How to Highlight Date Ranges in Power BI the Smart Way

When you want to guide a user’s attention to specific time ranges - for example, high-performing months or outlier periods - simply using bold colors or annotations might not be enough. A cleaner and more integrated solution is to use highlighted date ranges directly inside your visuals.
Dec 18 / datatraining
This tutorial walks you through how to build a reusable method to highlight any custom time period inside a chart, using only native Power BI features.

Step 1: Use the Chart Background Layer

Power BI now supports layering visuals, so you can use a secondary column chart as a background highlight for your main line chart.

  1. Insert a line and clustered column chart.
  2. Bind it to the date field (e.g. dimDate[Date]).
  3. Create a column in the date table that returns 1 only if the date is within your target range (weekends or holidays).
4. Create highlighting measures like and place them on the column y-axis:
Note: highlighting the holidays would follow similar approach.

Step 2: Format the Highlight Layer
Style the combo chart:
  • Set bar color to something soft (e.g., light blue)
  • Reduce the bar width for subtlety by putting the space between the categories to 0%
  • Turn off data labels
Step 3: Adding the slicer buttons

1. Create the disconnected table
2. Use the Value column as a slicer and format the slicer
3. Create a new highlight measure or adjust the previous one, make sure you place it on the y-axis to make the slicer work
Result: a clean visual with highlighted periods directly beneath the data line.
In this video I also explain how to build this column alternative:
Why This Matters for UX

  • This approach doesn’t add clutter or distract from the data.
  • It improves readability by subtly guiding the user’s focus.
  • You don’t need custom visuals or bookmarks - it’s fully native and reusable.
  • You can bind the highlight logic to user selections, KPIs, or time intelligence filters.

    This is a simple but impactful way to boost clarity and storytelling in your Power BI dashboards.

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.

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