A Sankey from your crosstab, without Power BI
You have a table, you want to see where the quantities go, and Power BI is the first tool that comes to mind. It can do it, at the cost of a visual to add, data to flatten and a licence to share. If the Sankey is what you are after, there is a shorter way: paste the table as it is.
Free, in the browser, no account.
The Power BI Sankey visual and the Crosstab mini-app
Power BI facts checked against Microsoft's documentation and repository, October 2026.
| Power BI | Crosstab mini-app | |
|---|---|---|
| The Sankey | No native visual: a custom visual to add from AppSource | The Sankey is the core of the tool |
| Data shape | One source field, one destination field, one weight: a crosstab must first be unpivoted in Power Query | The crosstab as it is, pasted from Excel; rows flow to columns |
| Years, scenarios, regions | Report filters and slicers | Extra headers become dimensions, laid out as rows, columns, bands or a filter |
| Pivot table | Native Matrix visual; cross-filtering between the visuals of a page | The pivot table and the Sankey drive each other: move a dimension and both are redrawn |
| Other readings | Power BI's whole visual library | Donut and bars, in sync with the Sankey |
| Installation | Power BI Desktop, free, on Windows 10 or later | A browser, on any system |
| Sharing | The free plan does not share; Pro at $14/user/month (billed yearly) to publish and to view | Free SVG, PNG or PDF export; interactive publishing, readable without an account, with Dataviz Studio |
| Data sources | Connectors, data model, scheduled refresh | A pasted table or an .xlsx / .csv file |
What the mini-app does with your table
Copy a crosstab from Excel: the first column names the rows, the first row names the columns, every cell is a value. Pasted into the mini-app, it becomes a flow from rows to columns, with proportional widths. Totals rows and columns are left out.
If your table carries extra headers (a row of years above the columns, a column of scenarios in front of the rows), they become dimensions. They drive everything together: the Sankey, the pivot table, the donut and the bars. Move a dimension from rows to columns, or turn it into a filter on a single member, and all four are redrawn. It is the gesture of a pivot table, applied to the diagram.
The mini-app works on a single flow, the one in your table. To chain several stages (harvest, processing, uses), "Open in the full editor" takes you to OpenSankey, the free and open-source editor.
When Power BI is still the right choice
When your data already lives in a Power BI model, fed by your databases and refreshed on its own, and the Sankey is just one visual among others on a dashboard the whole organisation reads. When your readers already have their licence, access security is handled by your administrators, and the report must update every morning without anyone touching it. Then the custom visual does the job: add it, unpivot your data, and stay where your numbers are.
The mini-app is made for the other case: one table, one question, a diagram to produce now, and no licence to ask for.
And if your numbers are incomplete
Neither the Power BI visual nor the mini-app computes a value you do not have. If your table has gaps, or numbers that do not add up from one source to another, the question changes nature: that is what our page Power BI and flow analysis is about.
Other comparisons
Your table comes from Excel? See from an Excel pivot table to a Sankey. You write your flows as text? See SankeyMATIC. All comparisons are here.