Build centralized, interactive Power BI dashboards by pinning visuals from multiple reports for quick, accessible data insights. Learn how to distinguish between reports and dashboards, and how to organize key visuals for stakeholders in the Power BI online service.
Key Insights
- Dashboards in Power BI are created by first building and publishing reports in the Power BI desktop app, then pinning selected visuals from those reports within the Power BI online service.
- Visuals pinned to a dashboard serve as entry points to their original reports, enabling users to access more detailed data analysis when needed, though the visuals on a dashboard do not interact with each other.
- This training explains that dashboard design options are limited to resizing and positioning visuals, making dashboards most effective for quick access rather than in-depth analysis or visual customization.
This lesson is a preview from our Power BI Certification Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Power BI dashboards allow us to easily access visuals that are stored in one or more reports. The way that we build dashboards is first by building reports and then publishing them to the service. So we build those reports as we have been in the Power BI desktop app.
We then publish those to the service, and once they're in the service, then we can pin visuals from those reports into a dashboard. So we build our dashboards in the Power BI online service. Once they're in the dashboard, we can not only see them, but we can also click on any of those visuals in the dashboard, and it will take us to the report it came from.
So essentially it's kind of like a way of bookmarking things into one single place, and then you can bounce off of that dashboard into various different reports. Now, when people ask you to create a dashboard, you do have to understand whether they really want a dashboard or just want to visualize their data. Sometimes people will ask for a dashboard when they really mean what Power BI calls a report.
So first we build the reports, and then if that's good enough, we stop there, but if we want to pin visuals from one or more reports into a dashboard, we can do that if that's what people really want. Let's see how to do this. Let's say I go into one of my reports here in the service.
So I'm at app.powerbi.com, and I've published a report. I can go to that report and find some visuals that I want to make easy to access. Let's say pinning multiple ones together into the same place into a dashboard, I can pin that visual.
So I hover over, and I click the little pin. I can give it a name, so let's say the CEO wants to see the sales returned. Quick, easy access to it.
So I pin that visual. Now I can go to that dashboard, and here it is on the dashboard. There are limited design options that we have.
We can kind of size things in kind of a grid, but the idea is that we can see this, and if we want to, we can click on it to go to that particular full report. These live in the service, so when I go to a particular workspace where I've created that dashboard, notice that now we have the third kind of thing here, this is a dashboard. So of the three things that we have, we have our dashboards, which are a collection of visuals from across one or more reports.
We have the reports, there are the semantic models, which are copies of the data, and all the modeling that we do. So if I jump into a particular dashboard, I can see whatever visuals I pinned to that dashboard. Now, let me go back and go into a different report, this report here, and I could also pin this visual as well.
So I can hover over that visual, click pin, put that on the same CEO dashboard, or create a new one. So now whenever I go to my workspace here, go into that particular dashboard. Now I can arrange these however I see fit.
I can resize, but there are limitations here. I'm not really designing this a lot here I'm just sizing and positioning them here so that they can be easily accessed and whenever the CEO wants to see this information you can just come here and then see it and if they want to bounce out of here and go to the particular report that talks more about it this one will go to this report and if I go back this one will go to this other report. So essentially, dashboards are a way of pinning visuals from one or more reports into one place for easy access to the information, and while you can interact somewhat with these visuals, they don't filter each other because these visuals could come from different reports.
To do things like filtering, you'd have to click on a visual and dive into that report and do your in-depth data analysis in each individual report.