BDO · Power BI plug-in web tool

A Power BI plug-in that does the formatting for you.

Designing a Power BI plug-in to cut the effort of turning complex datasets into clear, brand-compliant visual diagrams for BDO.

Power BIProduct design · B2B tooling · Data visualisation
Overview

Presentation Solutions was approached by BDO to explore a Power BI plug-in that could support visualisation templates linked to complex datasets.

BDO teams were already using PSL’s Create platform to produce templated presentation content. Getting those templates into Power BI was another matter. It took real manual effort and real Power BI expertise, and plenty of the people doing it were fairly new to the tool. Work was slow and the output drifted.

I led UX and product design, working alongside front-end and back-end engineers so that what we drew stayed inside what Power BI would actually permit. Weekly check-ins with the product owner kept scope and constraints honest.

My role
Lead UX and product designer
Team
UX, product, and front-end and back-end engineering
Focus
Templated data visualisation, designed inside Power BI’s constraints
01 · The challenge

Analysis was the easy part.

People used Power BI to explore a dataset and find something worth saying. That bit worked.

Turning those analytical charts into consistent, presentation-ready output was where the time went. Building a reusable visual template asked for a level of Power BI confidence not everyone had, so few people built one. Reports drifted apart from each other, and the same formatting job got done over and over.

01

Time went on repetition

Producing the same templated output again and again ate hours that belonged to the analysis.

02

The effort was manual

Formatting a set of visuals to brand by hand is slow, and it has to be redone every time the data moves.

03

Hand-pulled data went wrong

Moving figures across by hand left room for the wrong numbers to end up in a finished report.

04

Templates needed expertise

Making a reusable template took more Power BI confidence than most users had.

01 · Problem and constraints

Designing within user, workflow and platform limits.

Problem and constraints matrix across three columns: user context, workflow challenges and platform constraints
The whole problem on one sheet. Who the users are and what they can do, where the workflow costs them time, and what Power BI itself will and will not allow.View full size
02 · Working inside the constraints

Early workshops put UX, product and engineering round the same board to work out what could realistically live inside Power BI.

01

Whiteboard workshops

02

Journey mapping

03

Feature brainstorms

04

Playback sessions

In the workshops

We mapped how people move between Power BI, the add-in and the web experience, and marked every point where that movement costs them something.

Workshop board sorting tools into toolbar, secondary menu and three-dot locations, with the exercise brief written up beside it
The exercise: put every tool you would want on a sticky, then move it under Toolbar or the three-dot menu. Where people hesitated told us as much as where they agreed.View full size
System flow diagram mapping the routes through the Power BI web page and the add-on, with a key for start and end points, actions, decisions, delays and documents
Every route through the web page and the add-on, mapped with a shared key so engineering and design were arguing about the same diagram. The dead ends matter here: no workspace found, link broken, updates not visible.View full size
03 · Shaping it

Design went back to stakeholders and engineers in regular playbacks. Not finished solutions.

Each session walked through a user journey, flagged the technical risks, and drew a line between what design had settled and what still needed investigating. It kept expectations in the same place across three teams, and it meant nobody was surprised late.

A wall of sticky notes listing the features BDO asked for, from brand colour palettes and number formats to page templates and a measures library
What BDO actually asked for. Brand palettes, number formats as default, standardised page templates, a measures library, section dividers, a transmittal letter. Read down the wall and nearly all of it is formatting somebody was doing by hand.View full size
Sticky notes from the team feature brainstorm covering toggles, drafts, templates, layout options and scanning an old layout
And what the team put back. Toggle a change across every template at once. Save as draft at any stage. Save as template. Scan an old layout and reuse it.View full size
04 · Low fidelity

Wireframes came next, annotated so engineering could read the intent off the screen rather than ask for it.

Annotated low-fidelity wireframes covering the pivot structure, linked visuals, the lightweight toolbar and the workspaces and reports list
Pivot structure, linked visuals, the lightweight toolbar, and the workspaces and reports list. The notes down the side are what the screens are for.View full size
05 · Design decisions

Make it feel like Power BI, not a new app.

01

Borrow the navigation

Use Power BI’s existing navigation, terminology and workflows, so there is nothing new to learn for people who came here to analyse data.

02

Templates as real objects

A layout should be something you save, reuse and apply across reports, not something you rebuild each time.

03

One toolbar, within reach

Keep the constant tools in a single toolbar that collapses out of the way when someone needs the canvas back.

04

Say when something is wrong

Handle the moments where a permission or a licence blocks an action, instead of letting the add-in fail quietly.

Toolbar state exploration: default, header selected, single and multiple selection, disabled icons and a labelled variant
Toolbar states. Default, header selected, one item selected, several selected, icons disabled, and a labelled version for people who wanted words as well as symbols.View full size
Two-column and horizontal toolbar layout options
Two-column and horizontal layouts, weighed against how much canvas each one takes away.View full size
06 · Final designs

The plug-in as it ended up.

The Power Tools add-in showing every workspace a person can reach, with report and dashboard types listed alongside
Workspaces inside the add-in. Everything a person can reach, with the type of each item and when it last changed, so you can tell a dashboard from a paginated report without opening it.View full size
Reports and data: a filterable list of every report and data type with its location
Reports and data. One filterable list, with where each thing lives.View full size
A revenue report with the visual menu open, showing export data, show as a table, spotlight, export to PPT and move to layout
Move to layout takes a visual you built for analysis and drops it into a branded template slot.View full size
The revenue report on a widescreen monitor with the visual menu open and the move-to-layout submenu expanded, offering one, two and four up
The same menu on a real report, with move to layout open. One up, two up, four up. That is the whole interaction: pick a visual, pick how many to a page, and the branded template does the rest.View full size
The invalid permissions state shown inside PowerPoint, telling the user their licence is not valid and to contact their support team
The unhappy path. If a licence is not valid, the add-in says so inside PowerPoint and points at the person who can fix it.View full size
07 · Outcome
A Power BI plug-in that helps teams get from data analysis to presentation-ready visuals with less effort and more consistency.

Putting templating, layout and visual management inside Power BI supports collaboration, takes the sting out of version control, and lowers the barrier for less experienced users, while fitting the workflow people already have.

This case study uses selected project artefacts from the design work. Client-identifiable and sensitive detail has been kept out of view.