The Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 rule, states that roughly 80% of outcomes are often driven by just 20% of the causes. In business, this typically means that a small number of products, customers, or regions generate the majority of your revenue, profit, or other key performance indicators.

One of the most common ways to apply the Pareto Principle is through ABC classification, which groups items based on their cumulative contribution to a chosen metric. Category A contains your highest-impact items, B represents the next most significant group, and C captures the remaining long tail of lower contributors. This makes it easy to prioritize your analysis and focus on what matters most.

It is a simple but powerful way to decide where to focus your energy and where to stop over-investing. Here, we'll build a dynamic Pareto chart in Power BI that combines cumulative contribution with ABC classification. Along the way, you'll also see how Visual Calculations can simplify the implementation.

Here is how to build it in Power BI, Let’s dive in!

A line and clustered column chart showing products ranked by total sales, with a cumulative running sum line overlaid. Three shaded background zones mark the A, B, and C groups, and a letter label sits at the boundary of each group. The sorting, grouping, and cumulative logic are all handled by visual calculations - no complex DAX measures needed.

In our example

We have a product sales table with a Product ID and a Total Sales measure. That is all you need to follow along.

Insert a line and clustered column chart.

• X-axis - Product ID

• Column y-axis - Total Sales

At this point you have a standard column chart. Take a look at the bars here though - this is where you get a feel for where the natural revenue cutoffs sit and decide on your group thresholds.

Go to Columns > Layout and adjust the space between categories to 0

Step 2 - Add the visual calculations (Pct of total & Running Sum)

Go to the visual, click the visual calculations button, and add them in this order.

Percent of Grand Total - calculates each product's share of total sales. Add this to the column y-axis.

Running Sum - calculates the cumulative percentage, ordered by Total Sales descending. This is what sorts the products from highest to lowest and builds the curve. Add this to the line y-axis.

Total Sales and Percent of Grand Total are no longer needed as visible columns - they were only needed to feed the visual calculations. Hide Percent of Grand total series from the column y-axis and move the Total Sales to the tooltips.

Few Adjustments:  Format the percent of grand total & Running sum series to % via the Properties - Data Format - Format Options.

The Group A, B, and C columns create the shaded background zones. Give each a different shade of green - darker for A, medium for B, lighter for C - to visually distinguish the three tiers.

For the A, B, and C label series, set transparency to 100% so they are completely invisible. They are only there to carry the data labels in the next step.

Turn on data labels only for the A, B, and C series. Turn them off for everything else.

For each of the three series:

• Turn on Title, turn off Value

• The title will show the series name - A, B, or C - sitting at the bottom of the column right at the group boundary

(The Image shows for series “A”, likewise set it up for “B” & “C” Series as well)

And there you go!

Hope you like it!

Give it a try and see how it works for you! I’d love to hear what you think or see how you use this trick in your own reports.