Designing Dashboards

This chapter leverages the dataset and report development features and concepts from prior chapters to plan and develop Power BI dashboards and apps. Alternative dashboard architectures are described, including an organizational architecture that aligns business teams at different levels of an organization to a common set of corporate KPIs.

The design and implementation of these dashboards and apps, including layout, custom links, and mobile-optimized dashboards, are described in this chapter. Additionally, other top features and capabilities of dashboards are reviewed, including live report pages and the integration of content from other report types, including paginated reports and Microsoft Excel workbooks.

In this chapter, we will review the following topics:

• Dashboards versus reports
• Dashboard design
• Dashboard architectures
• Dashboard tiles
• Live report pages
• Mobile-optimized dashboards

Dashboards versus reports

Executives and senior-level stakeholders require a holistic view of the top metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) established by their organization. While Power BI reports deliver a visually rich data analysis experience, optionally at a very detailed level, Power BI dashboards provide a simplified “single pane of glass” for viewing top metrics.

Additionally, since the tiles of dashboards can be linked to their source report visuals or other dashboards, a dashboard can serve as the starting point to optionally navigate to other dashboards and underlying reports.

From a technical standpoint, Power BI dashboards are exclusive to the Power BI online service and are primarily composed of tiles representing visuals from one or many reports. While Power BI reports are often limited to a single source dataset, a dashboard’s tiles can represent multiple datasets from highly disparate sources to help provide a 360-degree view...

Dashboard design

The design of dashboards and their relationship to both reports and other dashboards is critical to provide a consistent and robust package of information assets for an organization. Report authors and BI teams can use visual selection, layout, and supporting tiles to maximize the value and usability of dashboards.

Report authors are best positioned to produce initial drafts of dashboards based on their knowledge of the most utilized or valued report visuals. Ultimately, a well-designed dashboard delivers both at-a-glance visibility to the most important metrics for the consumer as well as accessibility to supporting and related details.

Particularly for executives and senior management, the dashboard should support all essential business questions and metrics, without requiring any user clicks.

If an executive or senior manager regularly has to access underlying reports, make filter selections on live pages, or utilize several dashboards to answer core...

Dashboard architectures

For small projects and the early iterations of an agile BI project, a single dashboard and a few supporting reports may be sufficient. For many users, however, multiple dashboards with their own distinct reports are required. Both of these approaches, a single dashboard and multiple dashboards, are geared toward a specific stakeholder or group of consumers, such as the vice president of sales.

Although these different methodologies may meet the needs of their intended users, a potential risk is a lack of coordination across teams. For example, business units might reference distinct metrics included in their dashboard and these metrics may not be included in the dashboards of senior managers or other business units.

To promote greater consistency and coordination across groups of users, BI teams can pursue an integrated, organizational dashboard architecture. In this approach, the same metrics and KPIs considered strategic for the organization are...

Dashboard tiles

Most dashboard tiles are created in the Power BI service by pinning a visual in a report to a new or existing dashboard in the same workspace. However, dashboard tiles can also be created by adding a tile directly from the dashboard itself and by pinning from an Excel workbook or Report Server report.

With a report open in the Power BI service, hovering over the top-right corner of a visual exposes the Pin visual icon, as shown in Figure 9.13:

Figure 9.13: Pin visual icon for report visual

Once pinned to the dashboard, several options are available for configuring tiles depending on the type of tile and the content it contains. In the Global and Europe Sales dashboards described previously, a subtitle was added to each tile (for example, France) and custom links were applied to allow direct navigation from the Global dashboard to the Europe dashboard.

In addition, for the top, left-most visual, the Display last refresh time setting was enabled...

Live report pages

Live report pages allow entire report pages to be pinned to dashboards. This can be useful in certain situations where the interactivity of reports is desired along with the consolidation benefits of dashboards.

For some users, the self-service data exploration experience provided within Power BI report pages is the most valuable use case of Power BI content. Although a dashboard of tiles may initiate or contribute to an analysis, these users often have more complex and unpredictable analytical needs such that greater flexibility is required. Additionally, these users are generally much more comfortable and experienced in interacting with Power BI content, such as modifying slicer selections and drilling up and down through hierarchies.

To provide both the self-service experience of a report page as well as the consolidation benefits of a dashboard, an entire report page can be pinned as a single tile to a dashboard. In Figure 9.27, showing a dashboard...

Mobile-optimized dashboards

Just like the mobile layout view in Power BI Desktop described in Chapter 8, Applying Advanced Analytics, the Power BI service provides a Mobile layout to customize a mobile-optimized layout for dashboards. With a Mobile layout configured for a dashboard, the specific tiles, sizes, and order of tiles defined for the Mobile layout are presented to a user when the dashboard is accessed via the Power BI mobile app.

The Mobile layout is accessed via the drop-down Edit menu in the dashboard header as shown in Figure 9.29:

Figure 9.29: Dashboard phone view

The same drag and resize options available in the mobile layout for Power BI Desktop are also available for the dashboard. In Figure 9.30, the most important tiles from the Global Sales dashboard are positioned at the top and less important tiles are unpinned:

Figure 9.30: Phone view of dashboard in Power BI service

Power BI saves the mobile layout automatically and the defined...

Summary

This chapter demonstrated how dashboards are planned and developed as part of a large, integrated corporate BI solution. All essential features and processes of Power BI dashboards were highlighted, including the configuration of dashboard tiles, their links to other dashboards and reports, and mobile-optimized dashboards. Additionally, the unique capability of dashboards to integrate real-time data as well as their ability to include content from reporting services reports and Excel workbooks were reviewed.

The next chapter transitions from the development of Power BI content to the management of Power BI content. This includes the application of version control to Power BI Desktop files and the migration of content across test and production environments using workspaces.

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