1. Add the visual to your report

In Power BI Desktop, go to the Visualizations pane → click the three dots → Get more visuals → search for Histogram Pro.

2. Bind your data

Put the field that identifies one observation — Order ID, Customer, Ticket, Employee — in Detail (rows), and the number to distribute — Sales, Days to close, Score — in Values. The visual counts one row per Detail value, so the Detail field decides what "one" means: one order, one customer, one ticket.

3. Read the shape, then tune it

The chart starts with 10 bins and the mean and median lines. Open the Format pane to add quartiles, IQR shading, a benchmark, value zones or the cumulative line, and (Pro) to change the bin count.

4. Compare groups

Drop a field such as Region or Year into Small multiples (Pro). You get one histogram per value, on the same bins and the same vertical scale, so the panels can be compared bar by bar.

Bars

Each bar is a range of values (a bin) and its height is how many rows fall in it. All bins are the same width. Hover a bar for its range, its count, its share of all rows and — with the cumulative line on — the share of rows up to and including it.

Mean and median

The mean (dashed) and the median are drawn as vertical lines. The gap between them is the quickest read of skew there is: a mean well to the right of the median means a long upper tail — a few large values are pulling the average up.

Quartiles and IQR

P25 and P75 mark the first and third quartiles; the IQR shading covers the middle half of the rows between them. A narrow band means a consistent process; a wide one, a spread-out one.

The clipped axis

When a few extreme values would stretch the axis until everything else sits in the first bar — the full range at least 1.5 times wider than where the data lives — the axis stops at Tukey's fences (Q1 − 1.5·IQR to Q3 + 1.5·IQR) and a note at the bottom says "Axis clipped to the long tail · the last bar holds everything above X". No row is dropped: values beyond the axis are counted in the end bar, and the mean, the median and σ are computed over every row.

Value zones Pro

Two cut points split the axis into three shaded zones — for example small, medium and large deals. Each zone is labelled with its share of rows and, optionally, its share of the total value. The two numbers together answer the concentration question directly: "> 50K: 8% of rows · 46% of value" means a few large deals carry almost half the revenue.

Cumulative frequency Pro

A line from 0% to 100% on its own right-hand axis: the share of rows at or below the end of each bin. Read across from 80% to find the value that 80% of rows stay under, without counting bars.

Benchmark

A vertical target line — a turnaround time, a tolerance, a policy limit. With Color bars by benchmark the bars on each side take their own colour, so "how much falls on the wrong side" reads at a glance. A bar is coloured by its midpoint.

Normal curve Pro

A bell curve with the same mean and standard deviation as your data, scaled to the bars. It is a visual reference, not a normality test: read it as "clearly not normal" rather than "normal". With a long tail, σ is much wider than the axis and the bell is nearly flat over it; the chart then says "Normal curve flat: data far from normal" next to the curve.

Statistics panel Pro

n, mean (μ), median (M), standard deviation (σ), min and max in the top-right corner. When rows are trimmed, n says how many. The panel hides itself when the plot is narrower than about 260 px, so it never covers the bars.

Small multiples Pro

Every panel shares the same bins and the same vertical scale, so a taller bar is really more rows. Mean, median, quartiles, zones and the statistics panel are computed per panel, over that panel's rows. Panels are sorted by the value of the Small multiples field (numbers and dates in order, text alphabetically), and the legend is drawn once for all panels.

Histogram

Axes

Statistics

Value zones Pro

Benchmark

Value labels Pro

Small multiples Pro

Legend

IBCS

IBCS mode switches to the International Business Communication Standards notation: dark grey bars, solid black mean, dashed grey median, greyscale zones. It overrides the colour settings while it is on.

Click a bar

Filters the rest of the page to every row behind that bar, and the bar stays highlighted while the others dim. Click it again, or click empty space, to clear.

Ctrl+click

Adds bars to the selection (or takes one out). Within small multiples, Ctrl+click adds bars of the same panel; a click in another panel starts a new selection.

Bookmarks

The selection is stored with the report, so a bookmark brings back both the filter and the highlighted bars. In Desktop, Ctrl+click a bookmark button to try it while editing.

Drilldown

With a hierarchy in Detail (rows), the visual uses Power BI's selection so drill-down on a bar works as in a native chart.

Highlighting from other visuals

When another visual highlights a subset, the part of each bar that belongs to it is drawn solid over the dimmed total.

• Keyboard: Tab into the chart, then ←/→ (or ↑/↓) to move between bars, Home/End for the first and last, Enter or Space to select, Ctrl+Enter to add to the selection, Esc to clear, Shift+F10 or the context-menu key for the menu.
• Screen readers: each bar is announced with its range, count and share of total, and whether it is selected.
• High contrast: under a Windows high-contrast theme bars, lines, zones and text take the theme's colours; zones become dashed outlines instead of fills.
• Language: the format pane and every label on the chart follow Power BI's language — English and Spanish.

Pro preview

Turn on a Pro feature while editing without a licence and it is drawn working, on your own data, under a "Pro preview" watermark that names it — together with Power BI's own notification and its link to the licence. In reading view, published reports and exports the free chart is shown, without watermark or prompt.