Organizational themes in Power BI
Manage and Share Organizational Themes Centrally
In an organizational setting, maintaining consistent reporting standards is crucial. If we don’t, everyone tends to pick their own backgrounds, colors, and font sizes. Those who have worked with multiple Power BI developers know how chaotic that can get. Even if you already have a company theme file (JSON), it’s easy for people to forget about it or not know where to find it. Before you know it, things can get pretty messy. With the new organizational themes feature in Power BI, managing themes is a lot simpler.
Power BI report creators do not need to upload or change themes themselves. They simply pick from the themes set up centrally for the whole organisation. Administrators can publish more than one theme, so users are not limited to a single option.
What are themes in Power BI ?
If you are new to Power BI themes, they are JSON files that define a report’s styling. The easiest way to create one is directly in Power BI Desktop.
- Go to View in the main ribbon
- Click Themes,
- Customize current theme
- Adjust colors, fonts, and other options
- Save it (and download it).
This generates a JSON file you can reuse or edit for more advanced styling.
For more advanced use, you can edit the JSON file directly. This lets you control borders, shadows, and many other layout details that are not available in the simple menu.
If you want to learn more about how to create a theme, this is the official Microsoft documentation.
Themes in Power BI: Click on view to navigate to the available themes.
You can choose to browse for saved themes, visit the theme gallery for inspiration, or edit the current theme.
How to enable and upload organizational themes?
Since July 2025, Power BI supports organisational themes. These are managed in the Admin Portal and made available to everyone in the organisation.
An administrator uploads a custom JSON file in the Admin Portal. After uploading the file, it is disabled by default. The admin can then enable it and decide if it should appear in the theme gallery. By making it appear in the theme gallery, all users will see it when they go to the theme view.
Only administrators can configure organisational themes. Report creators can only access and use them.
The tenant admin can add multiple themes and can decide if they are enabled in the theme gallery.
How to find the organizational themes in Power BI?
Once we get our organizational themes set up and visible in the theme gallery, everyone in the organization can easily pick them from the theme dropdown in Power BI Desktop and the Power BI Service. Just a heads up:
- Themes don’t get applied automatically; users need to select them manually!
- Also, updating a theme won’t change existing reports, which helps avoid any accidental formatting mishaps.
- The admin can set a theme as the default for reports generated by Copilot. Just keep in mind that this only affects the first page generated by Copilot when it’s creating your report.
Organizational Themes in Power BI are visible once the tenant admin adds and enables them.
Summary Organizational Themes and Video
Organizational themes help keep branding and layout consistent across all reports. They save creators time by removing the need to upload or adjust a theme manually, which also helps reduce errors with colors or fonts. Teams can still use slightly different versions while maintaining the overall corporate identity.
The best part is that administrators control and update organizational themes centrally. When there’s a change in corporate branding, the administrator just updates the JSON file once, and everyone gets access to the updated version automatically.
I created a video to show you the whole process of how to enable, upload and use organizational themes:
To help you get a feel for the process, I created a video.