You Are Now Wrong About Conditional Formatting! 🤯 Power BI July 2026 Update
In the Power BI July 2026 update, conditional formatting now works on Line Charts and visuals with Legends. This was a highly requested feature. It lets you apply data-driven colors across multiple visual types and keep colors consistent throughout your reports.
The Power BI team keeps shipping new features, and each one makes the experience a little better. One of them, conditional formatting support for Line and Legend visuals, landed in the July 2026 update and made one of my go-to interview questions completely obsolete.
Up until recently, when I used to interview Power BI professionals with a lot of experience in visualization, I had a good way to test them.
I’d ask one of these questions:
- Which visuals don’t support conditional formatting?
- I made some changes to my visual and now the conditional formatting option isn’t showing. Why?
- How do you apply conditional formatting on Line and Pie visuals?
It was an easy way to catch gaps. Conditional formatting wasn’t supported on legends. For Pie visuals, the workaround was to apply it on a Bar chart first and then switch to Pie. For Line visuals, we used to get extra color markers the same way.
And for the same reason, I have Power BI interview question video, which not more valid now
Power BI Interview Question: When does the conditional formatting option (FX icon) become unavailable in Power BI?
Power BI has been improving its visualization experience steadily over the last two years, with big updates coming regularly. This long-awaited feature finally made it into the July 2026 update. Conditional formatting is now supported on Line visuals and Legends.
Why it was needed on Line visuals
Just like any other visual, you sometimes need line segments to change color based on a condition. This helps explain things like margins going down or current year vs previous year comparisons.
Line segment coloring matters just as much as bar visual coloring. It helps communicate where things aren’t going well, especially when showing trends.
Why it was needed on Legends
Say your company always uses one color and your competitor uses another. On a report showing market share, you’d always want your company represented by the same color. That was possible for axis values but not for legends. This update fixes that. You can now apply conditional formatting on Pie, Stacked, and any other visual that uses a legend.
You can find the file here -
Original Source Data -
https://github.com/amitchandakpbi/powerbi/tree/main/Data%20for%20Learn%20Power%20BI%20Full%20Video
Make sure you have the latest version of Power BI Desktop. You can start with the provided file or find the solution file in the link above.
Create a Line Visual with Gradient and Color Measure
Start by creating a Line visual. Use Category on the X-axis and Net on the Y-axis.
Once the visual is created, open the Format pane on the right side. If it’s not open, open it manually.
In the Format pane, go to Lines, expand it, and then go to Color.
You’ll now see a Color option with an FX button. This means you can use a measure for conditional formatting. Format Style -> Field Value and What Field should we base this on? -> Category Color
Click on FX, choose Field Value, then search for your measure and select it. Click Apply.
To do this, you need to create a measure.
Category Color = SWITCH ( TRUE (), Max('Item'[Category] )= "Category 1", "Red", Max('Item'[Category] )= "Category 2", "Green", Max('Item'[Category] )= "Category 3", "Blue", Max('Item'[Category] )= "Category 4", "Yellow", Max('Item'[Category] )= "Category 5", "Orange", "Black" )Rule-based conditional formatting for a trend chart with Month Year on the X-axis and Margin % on the Y-axis. Pay attention here. I’ve used Number for the value type, not Percent. Even though it’s a percentage measure, we want to define the thresholds as numbers.
Create another Line visual with Category on the X-axis, Year as the Legend, and Net on the Y-axis.
Go to Lines, then Color, and click FX.
Get Amit Chandak’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
This time choose Gradient. Choose Measure Max Year
Set Gray as the lowest value and Blue as the highest. You’ll see the colors change based on the year.
Max Year = max('Date'[Year])Now create a page with Pie, Line, Bar, and Clustered Column Stacked Bar visuals. In each of them, go to the respective color section and apply the Brand Color measure.
All visuals will have Brand as the Legend or Axis, and we’ll use this measure to drive the colors across all of them.
Brand Color = SWITCH ( TRUE (), Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 1", "Yellow", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 2", "Green", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 3", "Blue", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 4", "Red", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 5", "Orange", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 6", "Purple", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 7", "Pink", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 8", "Cyan", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 9", "Lime", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 10", "Brown", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 11", "Gray", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 12", "Teal", Max('Item'[Brand])= "Brand 13", "Magenta", "Other" )With the new Power BI release, conditional formatting now works on both Axis and Legend. Line, Pie, and Stacked visuals have all been added to the conditional formatting support.
The original blog:
You can watch it in the video below.
Also check
Want to improve your Power BI and Microsoft Fabric skills? Check out my free YouTube course. It’s packed with practical, real-world examples. Start with the videos below.
Complete Course on Power BI (20 Hours)
Microsoft Fabric Live — Fabric Data Days (10 videos) — Nov -2025
Power BI Interview Questions — 70+ Videos
Mastering Microsoft Fabric 60+ Videos:
Microsoft Fabric Live Series Unedited — English Playlist
Microsoft Fabric Live Series Unedited — Hindi Playlist
My Medium blogs can be found here.
Click here to access all my blogs and videos in a jiffy via an exclusive glossary using Power BI. Please like, share, and comment on these blogs. I would appreciate your suggestions for improvement, challenges, and suggestions for topics so that I can explore these in more depth.
In addition, I have over 950 videos on my YouTube channel that are related to Power BI, Tableau, and Microsoft Fabric. With the help of these videos, you will learn hundreds of DAX and Power Query functions, in addition to hundreds of Power BI, use cases that will assist you in becoming an expert in Power BI. Make sure you like, share, and subscribe.
Master Power BI
Expertise in Power BI
Power BI For Tableau User
DAX for SQL Users
Learn SQL
