Frequently asked questions

In Power BI Desktop or the Power BI service, open the Visualizations pane, choose … (Get more visuals), search for ChartPad, and select Add. The visual's icon then appears at the bottom of the pane. You can also browse the listings on the Microsoft Marketplace. Every ChartPad visual is Microsoft-certified, so the Power BI Certified filter in "Get more visuals" narrows the list to ours and others like them.

Yes. Your Power BI administrator can either allow the specific visual, or add it to your tenant's Organizational visuals store, which makes it available to everyone in the organisation without opening AppSource up. Get in touch and we will send you the package file to upload.

Visuals installed from AppSource update themselves in the Power BI service, and Power BI Desktop prompts you when a newer version is available. If your administrator deployed the visual through the Organizational visuals store instead, updates are not automatic: they need to upload the new version, and we will tell you when there is one.

All of them are supported in Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service, and they lay out responsively in the mobile apps. Environments where AppSource licensing does not apply are covered below.

No. Every ChartPad visual is fully functional before you pay for it: no feature is locked, reduced or hidden. You can build, test and demo the complete visual for as long as you need.

Only one thing: it removes the small license notification that an unlicensed visual displays in published reports. Licensing is about what your audience sees, not about unlocking capability. The chart itself renders identically either way.

Everyone who edits or views a report containing the visual needs their own license (in practice, everyone you share the report with). This is how Microsoft's AppSource per-user model works and it is the same for every vendor selling through it.

Buy from the visual's listing on the Microsoft Marketplace, choosing exactly how many licenses you need. You pay only for those, whatever range the plan covers. After checkout you are taken to the Microsoft 365 admin center, where licenses are assigned under Billing → Licenses. The person who bought them can assign them without needing an admin role. If an admin made the purchase, anyone holding the License Administrator or User Administrator role can assign them too. The steps are on our licensing documentation.

Their users stay licensed while the subscription is active, but if the purchaser was not an admin, nobody else can reassign those licenses: Microsoft offers no way to transfer a visual subscription bought by a non-admin, and tenant admins can cancel it but not manage it. The fix is for an admin to buy a new subscription, assign it to the same users and cancel the old one, with no interruption for anyone. To avoid this, have a tenant administrator make the purchase, especially if central IT should manage the licenses. See who manages the subscription.

Where a trial is enabled, activating it removes the license notification for 30 days, so you can pilot the visual in a real, shared report rather than only on your own screen. It is currently available on the Gantt Chart, Org Chart, Bump Chart and Marginal Abatement Cost Curve. For every other visual, the unlicensed version is still complete; you just see the notification while you evaluate.

Microsoft's licensing model cannot be applied on Power BI Report Server, Power BI Embedded, the SharePoint Power BI web part, Publish to web, or national and sovereign clouds. It is also the wrong shape for unlimited-viewer and fully offline deployments. None of these are dead ends: we license the visuals directly for them instead, with a key on an annual or 3-year term that you can buy on the licensing page.

Yes. For direct licensing, the all-visuals bundle on our licensing page covers the whole collection with a single key. For AppSource purchases, or to buy against a purchase order, contact us and we will put together a quote.

Per user, per visual. Every visual's page shows its annual AppSource price with a quick estimate for your number of users, next to the direct-license price for unlimited users. AppSource is billed by Microsoft, monthly or annually, and the figure on its Marketplace listing is always the live one at the point of purchase.

Microsoft does, for anything bought through the Marketplace. The subscription sits on your existing Microsoft billing account, invoices come from Microsoft, and you cancel or change seat counts in the Microsoft 365 admin center. ChartPad never handles your payment details. Direct licenses, for the environments listed above, are invoiced by us instead.

Marketplace purchases follow whatever billing relationship you already have with Microsoft, so if you buy Microsoft software through a partner or reseller today, ChartPad visuals go through the same route. For direct licensing we can quote and invoice you against a purchase order. Get in touch.

No. None of our visuals makes a network call of any kind. They request no external service access, so there is nowhere for your data to go. It is rendered inside the Power BI sandbox and stays in your tenant. Where a visual needs reference data to do its job, that data ships inside the package: the 3D Globe, for instance, resolves place names against a gazetteer built into the visual rather than by calling a geocoding service, which is what lets it be used under data-residency rules that normally rule map visuals out.

That Microsoft has reviewed and tested the visual's source code and confirmed it accesses no external services or resources. It is a verification of the claim above, not a design award. Certification is also what makes a visual usable in regulated and data-governed environments, and what enables the export behaviour described next. You can read Microsoft's definition in their certification documentation.

Yes, all of them. This is a direct consequence of certification. Uncertified visuals are excluded from PowerPoint and PDF export and appear blank in subscription emails; certified ones render properly in all three.

No. The visuals create no accounts, set no cookies, run no analytics and send no telemetry. There is no ChartPad server involved in rendering a report at all. Our privacy policy covers the website and our own contact with you; each visual also has its own policy setting out the same for the visual itself.

Each visual's interface follows the language of the Power BI environment it is running in. Coverage varies: some are localised into nine languages, others into more than thirty. Contact us if you need the list for a specific visual.

Yes. Colours default to your report theme's palette, and everything visible (colours, fonts, sizes, spacing, borders and labels) is exposed in the Power BI Format pane, so a visual can be made to sit alongside native ones without looking bolted on.

At docs.chartpad.io, which covers setup, every field and formatting option, and the problems report authors actually hit. Not every visual has a documentation section yet; where one is missing, its page on this site lists the fields it binds and what it can do, and we will answer anything else by email.

Email hello@chartpad.io or use the contact form. It is the same route for all three. For a bug, it saves a round trip if you include whether you are in Desktop or the service, the version shown on the visual's page in Power BI, and a screenshot or a small sample of the data. We do build custom and bespoke visuals; tell us what you need it to do.