Conditional Formatting with a Legend

[0Experience]

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping to get some ideas from the community.

As many of you know, when a visual uses a legend, Power BI doesn’t allow us to apply conditional formatting (from a table or measure) to control the column colors. I can apply conditional colors when there’s no legend.

I have multiple report pages, each containing several visuals, and manually adjusting the colors across all of them is becoming extremely time‑consuming.

Is there any way to apply conditional formatting to column colors while still using a legend?

Or, if that’s not possible, do you have any alternative approaches or best practices that could help make this easier to manage?

I’ve attached the Power BI file as well if anyone wants to take a look or experiment with it.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[v-achippa]

Hi @0Experience,

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Fabric Community.

Thank you @MFelix and @SamInogic for the prompt response.

As we haven’t heard back from you, we wanted to kindly follow up to check if the solution provided by the user's for the issue worked? or let us know if you need any further assistance.

Thanks and regards,

Anjan Kumar Chippa

[0Experience]

@v-achippa 

No, the solutions provided unfortunately did not meet my expectations. Thank you for checking, though.

[SamInogic]

Hi,

In Microsoft Power BI, conditional formatting of column/bar colours only works when a Legend is not used. If you remove the legend, you can fully control the colours using a measure or rules.

Steps to Apply Conditional Formatting Without a Legend

• Remove the Legend field from the visual.
• Create a colour measure that returns a colour code based on your logic.

Colour Measure =

SWITCH(
SELECTEDVALUE('Table'[Country]),
"Brazil", "#1f77b4",
"Germany", "#2ca02c",
"Japan", "#ff7f0e",
"USA", "#9467bd",
"#cccccc"
)

• Select the visual → Format pane → Data colours.
• Click the fx (conditional formatting) button.

Choose:

• Format style: Field value
• Based on field: Colour Measure

This will dynamically apply colours to the bars based on your logic.

Additionally,
If you still want users to understand the categories without a legend, you can:

• Enable Data labels
  • Show the category field on the axis
  • Add a separate legend visual or text explanation on the report

This approach allows you to maintain dynamic colour control while avoiding the limitation that occurs when a legend is present.

Hope this helps.

Thanks!

[MFelix]

Hi @0Experience ,

The colors are set based on the theme  so when you select a specific field the values will have the same color based on the order of the colors selected in this case you are using the base theme for Power BI so when you select the country it will apply the same color consistently to the 1st, 2nd, and so on.

The problem occurs when has you refer apply the legend and then the colors are repeated even when you select different column categories:

Depending on what type of visual you are using you can change this in order to get the condittional formatting.

For example in the case the you show you can make a concatenation of the x-axis instead of using the legend and in that case you can then use the condittional formatting using a table with the expected colors.

Check the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FG0DSSAr60

[0Experience]

@MFelix thanks for your detailed reply and for the examples. Really appreciate it.

However, I don't want to use the concatenation of the x-axis