I Built the Power BI Wireframing Tool I Wish Existed (It’s Free)

A simple wireframing tool for anyone who’s ever opened a blank Power BI canvas and thought: “Where does anything go?”

Here’s a problem almost nobody in the BI world talks about:

Before you build a dashboard, you have to decide what goes on it. And that decision — the part before the DAX, the slicers, the color palette, the bookmarks — is where most dashboards quietly fall apart.

We skip it. We open Power BI, drag a few visuals onto the canvas, and tell ourselves we’ll “figure out the layout as we go.”

We don’t. We just end up with a report that has nine visuals fighting for attention, three KPIs at the top that don’t relate to each other, a slicer panel nobody uses, and a vague feeling from stakeholders that the dashboard is “fine, but…”

That’s the problem I built the Page Grid Designer to solve.

You can try it free here → ootconsulting.com/page-grid-designer

What It Actually Does

The Page Grid Designer is a simple, visual planning tool that lets you wireframe a Power BI page before you build it. It works for Tableau too — anywhere you’re laying visuals on a canvas.

You drop in blocks for the things a dashboard page needs — KPI cards, a primary chart, supporting visuals, slicers, a title bar, navigation, a details table — and you arrange them on a grid until the page makes sense as a whole.

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That’s it. No DAX. No data model required. No 40-minute tutorial.

You’re not designing visuals. You’re designing the logic of the page — what the user sees first, what supports it, what story you’re telling at each glance, and where the eye should land.

When you’re done, you have a clear blueprint you can hand to a developer, share with a stakeholder for sign-off, or use yourself to build the page in Power BI in a fraction of the usual time.

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Why It’s Innovative

Most tools in this space pick a side.

Figma is for designers who don’t know Power BI. PowerPoint mockups are clunky and don’t reflect a real dashboard grid. Sketching on paper doesn’t translate to stakeholders. And building straight inside Power BI means you’re already paying the cost of pixel-pushing before you’ve even agreed on what the page should be.

The Page Grid Designer lives in the gap none of those fill.

It treats a dashboard page like what it actually is: a sequence of analytical decisions on a fixed grid. Not a blank canvas. Not a slide. A structured layout where every block earns its place.

That’s a shift in how to think about BI design — and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Why It’s Simple

I’m allergic to tools that require a tutorial.

If a free resource needs an onboarding sequence, three Loom videos, and a Slack community to figure out, it isn’t free — it’s expensive in your time.

The Page Grid Designer is the opposite. You open it, you start dragging blocks, and within about ninety seconds you understand exactly what it does and exactly how to use it.

No signup gate. No credit card. No “Pro version” hiding the actually-useful features. Just the tool.

I built it that way on purpose. The best tools are the ones you can teach in a sentence.

Why It’s Needed

Look at any dashboard you’ve shipped in the last two years that didn’t land the way you hoped.

I’d bet money the visuals weren’t the problem. The data model wasn’t really the problem either. The problem was structural: the page was trying to answer too many questions, or it was missing the one visual the user actually needed, or the hierarchy was wrong and the most important number was buried below the fold.

Structural problems can’t be fixed with prettier visuals or a darker theme. They have to be fixed before the visuals exist.

That’s what the Page Grid Designer forces you to do. It makes the structural decisions visible — and therefore fixable — at the cheapest possible stage: a grid on a screen, not a published report you have to refactor while three stakeholders are waiting.

For BI developers, analysts, consultants, and data teams, that’s the difference between a dashboard that drives decisions and one that just gets bookmarked and forgotten.

How People Are Actually Using It

A few of the use cases I’ve seen so far:

• Dashboard wireframing before opening Power BI Desktop
• Stakeholder sign-off on layout before development starts (huge time-saver)
• Multi-page report planning to keep navigation and hierarchy consistent
• Tableau dashboard planning — the grid logic transfers directly
• Team alignment between analysts, designers, and business users before anyone touches the data

It’s not glamorous work. It’s just the work that quietly determines whether a dashboard actually gets used.

Try It

The whole thing is free. No catch, no upsell, no “enter your email to unlock.” Just open it and start wireframing.

👉 **ootconsulting.com/page-grid-designer**

👉 Find me on LinkedIn: David Mendez | LinkedIn