Introduction to Dashboards for Power BI Designers

Power BI is known to be a business analytics service which delivers insights to support informed, quick decisions. Apart from that, business enterprises are using Power BI to transform their huge data volumes into comprehensive and attractive visuals that are easy-to-share among stakeholders and accessible through multiple devices. The core objective to choose Power BI is to get the authority to explore and analyze the data visually, both on-premise and in the cloud, while all are having a similar data view. Above all, you can scale your Power BI along with your built-in security and governance. Although every function of Power BI is matchless, those that helped Power BI gaining all the hype, are its tremendous capabilities of ‘Interactive Reporting’ and ‘Customized Dashboards’ that makes processes so organized and smooth.

What Power Can BI Do to Your Business?

Your business needs Power BI if you want it, business analytics needs meet by the largest business intelligence cloud of the world. With Power BI, you can explore how the consistent user-driven innovation and leading AI can help to turn your data into valuable insights across your organization at scale. But before all that you need to proficiently know the Power BI features and applications, and get your designers trained and qualified to use it with full aptitude. Although there are several Power BI features, that designers need to learn about before getting the tool fully operation, this blogpost will only talk about the ‘Power BI Dashboards’, to provide you detailed information about them.

What is a Power BI Dashboard?

Commonly called as a ‘Canvas’, a Power BI dashboard is a single page, that tells the whole story only through visualization. Since a dashboard/canvas is limited to only one page, it is crucial to design it carefully, so that it highlights all the critical business factors appropriately, and in the best visually attractive way possible. This narrates the whole story to the visitors in the form of charts, figures and graphs; and people who are interested in details can always go to the enclosed reports to excerpt the information they require. Until now, the ‘Dashboards’ feature is only a part of Power BI service and not available for Power BI Desktop. However, you can create one on mobile devices, and you can view and share them on your desktops.

 The Basics of Power BI Dashboards?

All the visualization that you will see on the canvas/dashboards are known as ‘Tiles’. When your reports are completed, Power BI allows you to pin the tiles from the reports to the dashboard to have a quicker view. In other words, these visualizations that we called tiles in the dashboard are originated from the reports that we create in Power BI, and every report is based on a defined dataset/s that are often interlinked to other reports and their respective datasets. You can also say that a dashboard is basically an entryway to the underlying datasets and reports, or simply say it is the visual representation of the data or information included in the reports, aiming at giving quick overview and insights to support informed decisions.

Learn to Explore, Create & Share Power BI Dashboards

1. Exploring Different Datasets

Power BI tools provide various options to explore datasets. While working on your Power BI dashboards and reports, you can use the option of getting quick insights. At the left side of your UI tool is the ‘Dataset Section’; navigate to this options and then click on the 3 dots (…) and then click on the ‘Get Insights’ option. Once you select the option, it will run all the algorithms in your datasets, and a notification will appear on your screen that ‘Insights are ready’ for your datasets. When you choose to publish a report to Power BI services, you will also get an option of ‘Quick Insight’ on the first page.

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     Creating A Power BI Dashboard

×           You can easily create a dashboard in Power BI by pinning visualization from the reports that are published using the Power BI desktop. All the visualizations that you create using Power BI service also have the pinning option to create dashboards.
×           If you want to pin a visual in Power BI, then open the Power BI report in your Power BI services, and select the ‘Pin’ icon at the top of the visual section.
×           As soon as you click the ‘Pin’ option, a new dialogues box will appear on your screen, asking you to create a new dashboard or to select an existing dashboard to put the visual from the dropdown list. The option for the existing dashboard will be faded if you don’t have an existing one.
×           Once you click on the ‘Pin’ button, you will receive a confirming notification that your visualization has been successfully pinned to the dashboard.
×           For verification, you can go to the ‘Workspaces’ section and check for your created dashboards.  
 

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     Sharing Dashboards in Power BI

In Power BI service, when you publish your BI reports, you can also share your reports and dashboards with your other colleagues or other users of Power BI. Sharing a dashboard in Power BI is very easy. However, this sharing features is only available at the Power BI Pro version. Simply by clicking on the ‘Share Dashboard’ options, you will be asked to enter the email id of the user to whom you want to share the dashboards. You can also allow the recipients to share the dashboard with other users further and also send email notifications. You can also share it by sending direct URL to the users, providing them with direct access to the dashboard.

Keep Learning

When you get comfortable at creating dashboards, try to take a tour at the available dashboard samples to learn about more functions and features. You can also go to the dashboard tiles option and learn about them in detail. If you still have something beyond your understanding, feel free to use the ‘Power BI & Q&A’ options to get your query answered in the form of easy visualization and step-by-step process.