Forum Discussion
Impactful IndividualIBCS-guided data visualizations in your Power BI reports
The International Business Communication Standards (IBCS) are practical proposals for designing business reports, presentations, and dashboards in terms of their conceptual design, visual perception, and semantic notation. The IBCS proposals formed the basis of the ISO 24896 standard notation for business reports (under development).
While there are paid custom visuals (with an additional per-user subscription fee), Power BI doesn’t provide a native way to build IBCS-guided data visualizations. But, in recent years, Power BI expanded SVG support in Table, Matrix, Card, and Image visuals, as well as Button and List Slicers. And we can use SVGs to customize core visuals for clarity and impact. The goal of good customization is not to decorate and randomize (e.g., using AI to generate as many “cool” templates as possible), but to streamline and unify BI reports, and that’s where IBCS guidelines become useful.
And with user-defined functions (UDFs) introduced in September 2025, report unification through customization is easier than ever. Free open-source UDF libraries let you embed charts into the core visuals just by calling a function. UDFs let you package DAX logic and reuse it like any built-in DAX function. DAX Lib is a free, open-source repository of DAX functions that you can easily import and use in your models. DAX Lib allows you to discover and download libraries of user-defined functions, as well as share your own functions with the community.
Among other useful applications, UDFs can be used to generate SVG images and create reusable custom data visualizations. I’ve published the PowerofBI.IBCS DAX Lib package with UDFs that generate IBCS (International Business Communication Standards)-guided visualizations for embedding into Power BI core visuals that support SVG images (Table, Matrix, New Card, Image, Button, and List Slicers).
Read more + interactive examples: https://powerofbi.org/ibcs/
DAX Lib package: https://daxlib.org/package/PowerofBI.IBCS/
1 Reply
v-hashadapuCommunity Support
Hi avatorl , We really appreciate you taking the time to post this! Your explanation of the visuals and the UDFs will definitely help users who run into similar use cases. But just for clarity, this space is primarily focused on answering specific questions, while detailed write-ups like yours are best shared on the Fabric Community Blog, where they’ll get even more visibility and engagement.