You built one chart that finally looks right. Then you built four more that don't, because you re-picked fonts, colours and borders from scratch on each one like it was the first time you'd ever opened the Format pane. Format painter fixes that in about three seconds per visual: select the good one, click the brush, click everything else.
How to do it
- Click the visual that already has the formatting you want everywhere else.
- On the Home ribbon, click Format painter. It's greyed out until you've done step 1, that's not a bug.
- Your cursor turns into a paintbrush. Click each target visual, one at a time, and you can do this across pages in the same session without re-copying.
- Done. No re-picking the same six settings on every chart in the report.
Why it works
Format painter copies the property values behind the pane, not just the pixels: title options (bar the actual text), data labels (bar display units and decimal places), data colours, including your colour-to-value mapping if the same field drives it, full axis styling, legend look (bar the label text), and borders and slicers. If the target visual has no matching setting, that property just gets skipped, not thrown as an error.
The one setting worth knowing about: axis Start and End values don't travel. Match the colours and fonts across five charts and you'll still get five different y-axis ranges unless you set those manually on each one, which quietly defeats half the point if the goal was charts you can actually compare at a glance, not just charts that match.
When not to use it
If your visuals are meant to look different, a KPI card that should stand out next to the trend chart beside it, painting them identical is actively wrong. Format painter enforces sameness. Use it once you've decided everything should match, not to find out whether it should.
If format consistency alone sounds like the fix for a report nobody trusts, it's worth reading Most Power BI dashboards are just decorated spreadsheets first. Matching fonts is still worth doing. It's just not the whole job.