Creating dashboards in Power BI is a fundamental skill for data analysts that involves assembling visualizations and reports into a single, interactive view. A dashboard serves as a centralized location where stakeholders can monitor key metrics and gain insights at a glance.
To create a dashboard…Creating dashboards in Power BI is a fundamental skill for data analysts that involves assembling visualizations and reports into a single, interactive view. A dashboard serves as a centralized location where stakeholders can monitor key metrics and gain insights at a glance.
To create a dashboard, you first need to publish reports from Power BI Desktop to the Power BI Service. Once published, you can pin individual visualizations from these reports to a new or existing dashboard. This pinning process allows you to select the most relevant charts, graphs, tables, and KPIs from multiple reports and combine them into one cohesive view.
Dashboards in Power BI are limited to a single page, which encourages focused design and prioritization of the most critical information. You can add tiles from various sources including reports, Q&A natural language queries, Excel workbooks, streaming datasets, and even web content or images.
Key features of dashboard management include arranging tiles by dragging and resizing them, adding titles and subtitles to tiles for context, and setting up data alerts that notify users when specific thresholds are reached. You can also enable featured dashboards that appear prominently when users access the workspace.
From a security perspective, dashboards inherit permissions from the workspace where they reside. You can share dashboards with specific users or groups, controlling whether recipients can reshare the content. Row-level security from underlying datasets also applies, ensuring users only see data they are authorized to view.
Dashboards support real-time streaming for live data scenarios and can be accessed on mobile devices through the Power BI mobile app. You can also set automatic page refresh intervals to keep data current. Additionally, dashboards can be embedded in applications, SharePoint sites, or Microsoft Teams for broader organizational access and collaboration.
Create Dashboards in Power BI - Complete Guide for PL-300 Exam
Why Creating Dashboards is Important
Dashboards are a critical component of Power BI that allow business users to monitor key metrics at a glance. They serve as a centralized location where stakeholders can view the most important information from multiple reports on a single page. For the PL-300 exam, understanding dashboard creation is essential as it represents the final step in delivering actionable insights to end users.
What is a Power BI Dashboard?
A Power BI dashboard is a single-page canvas, often called a canvas, that uses visualizations to tell a story. Unlike reports, dashboards: - Can only be created in the Power BI service (not Power BI Desktop) - Contain tiles pinned from multiple reports and datasets - Cannot have filters applied at the dashboard level - Display real-time data through streaming datasets - Are limited to a single page
How Dashboard Creation Works
Pinning Tiles: The primary method to add content to a dashboard is by pinning tiles from reports. You can pin individual visualizations, entire report pages, images, text boxes, and videos.
Adding Tiles: Use the Add tile option to include web content, images, text boxes, videos, and custom streaming data.
Dashboard Themes: Apply built-in or custom JSON themes to create consistent visual styling across all tiles.
Setting Featured Dashboards: Mark a dashboard as featured to make it the landing page when users open Power BI service.
Data Classification: Apply sensitivity labels and data classification tags to indicate the confidentiality level of dashboard content.
Mobile Layout: Configure a phone view to optimize the dashboard display for mobile devices.
Key Dashboard Features to Know
- Q&A: Natural language queries can be pinned as tiles - Alerts: Set data-driven alerts on gauge, KPI, and card tiles - Subscribe: Schedule email delivery of dashboard snapshots - Refresh: Tiles refresh when underlying data changes (based on dataset refresh schedule) - Comments: Add comments for collaboration with colleagues
Exam Tips: Answering Questions on Create Dashboards
1. Remember the location: Dashboards can ONLY be created in Power BI service, never in Power BI Desktop. This is a common exam question.
2. Know the difference between reports and dashboards: Reports support filtering and slicing; dashboards do not. Dashboards combine content from multiple sources; reports typically use one dataset.
3. Understand tile sources: Know that tiles can come from reports, Q&A, Excel, SSRS, and other dashboards.
4. Data alerts limitation: Alerts can only be set on tiles with numeric data like gauges, KPIs, and cards. Not all tile types support alerts.
5. Pin to existing vs new dashboard: When pinning, you choose between an existing dashboard or creating a new one.
6. Real-time dashboards: Questions about streaming datasets and real-time monitoring frequently appear. Know that push datasets and streaming datasets enable live updates.
7. Mobile optimization: Be familiar with the phone layout designer for creating mobile-friendly dashboard views.
8. Sensitivity labels: Understand how data classification and sensitivity labels apply to dashboards for governance questions.
9. Featured dashboard behavior: Only one dashboard can be featured per workspace, and it becomes the default view for that workspace.
10. Sharing permissions: When sharing dashboards, understand that recipients need appropriate permissions to view underlying reports and datasets.