Chapter 10: Understanding Dashboards, Apps, Goals, and Security

While reports are likely to be what you will interact with the most in the service, there are other aspects of the service that are quite powerful and can add tremendous value. It is important to understand the capabilities of dashboards and apps to determine the best method of sharing and collaborating on your work. In addition, scorecards and goals can help you keep track of important business metrics. Finally, it is imperative that you understand all of the objects within the service in order to ensure that only the proper individuals have access to and can interact with your data. The goal of this chapter is to familiarize you with all of the other objects within the service and understand how these different objects interrelate to one another in terms of security.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Understanding dashboards
• Creating and using apps
• Working with goals
• Understanding...

Technical requirements

You will need the following to successfully complete this chapter:

• An internet connection.
• An Office 365 account or Power BI trial.
• If you have skipped any of the previous chapters, you can download LearnPowerBI.pbix from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Power-BI-second-edition.
• Check out the following video to see the Code in Action: https://bit.ly/3kjTNyZ.

Understanding dashboards

Dashboards are single-page canvases that contain visualizations called tiles. These tiles are visualizations that are pinned from reports, other dashboards, Question and Answer (Q&A) displays, or other sources such as quick insights. Single visuals or entire report pages can be pinned.

At first, you may be confused with regard to the purpose of dashboards versus reports since both are essentially a collection of visualizations. The most important difference is that reports can only contain visuals based upon a single dataset, while Power BI dashboards can contain visuals from many different reports within the same workspace. In addition, dashboards have exclusive features, such as setting alerts, setting a featured dashboard, control over navigation, and the ability to view real-time data streams.

Because dashboards can contain information from one or more reports and one or more data sources, dashboards allow end users to create a single, customized...

Creating and using apps

Apps are a method of bundling multiple dashboards and reports into a single object that is then published and shared within the organization. Hence, instead of sharing individual dashboards and reports or granting permissions to an entire workspace, apps allow the author to choose exactly what content to bundle and share, providing an effective means of organizing shared content and controlling access.

Creating an app

Before we create an actual app, let's add some content to our workspace so that we can understand how workspace objects can be included and excluded from our app. We will create an additional dashboard and report within our workspace by simply duplicating our existing dashboard and report.

To create a copy of the existing dashboard, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the existing dashboard by expanding the workspace in the Navigation pane and clicking on the dashboard that appears under the Dashboards heading.
2. From the File...

Working with goals

Goals and scorecards are relatively new types of objects in the Power BI service that allow users to track key metrics against business objectives. Goals provide something for teams to measure their progress toward achieving business objectives against, with the ability to share updates and analyze detailed data when necessary. Goals can be organized into scorecards that incorporate content from multiple workspaces in order to provide a single window into the health of an organization.

Goals require a Power BI Premium capacity or a Premium Per User (PPU) license. Let's explore how you create and use goals and scorecards in the service.

Creating scorecards and goals

To create a new scorecard, do the following:

1. Navigate to a Premium workspace (designated with a diamond icon).
2. Click Goals in the Navigation pane.
3. Click the New scorecard button in the upper right of the canvas. This displays the Create scorecard dialog, as shown in the following...

Understanding security and permissions

There are several levels of security and permissions within the Power BI service. It is important to understand these various permission levels in order to ensure that users can only access the appropriate reports, dashboards, apps, and data.

The main levels of permissions within Power BI are listed as follows:

• Workspace permissions
• App permissions
• Object permissions (dashboards, reports, scorecards, and datasets)
• Row-Level Security (RLS)

Workspace permissions

Workspaces serve as logical containers in which you can store dashboards, reports, scorecards, workbooks, datasets, and dataflows. So far, we have only worked with a single report and dataset. But workspaces can contain dozens or even hundreds of different dashboards, reports, scorecards, workbooks, datasets, and dataflows. Assigning security at a workspace level provides access to all of the objects within the workspace. This means that workspace access...

Summary

This chapter introduced three important types of objects in the Power BI service: dashboards, apps, and scorecards.

Dashboards are a powerful feature that allows end users to bring together all of the most important information from multiple reports, datasets, other dashboards, Q&A, and other sources into a single-page canvas consisting of tiles. These tiles can be adjusted on the canvas and allow for the creation of data alerts to immediately inform users when key metric thresholds are met.

Apps, on the other hand, allow multiple dashboards and reports to be bundled together as an independent application and published to users. These apps provide similar features and functionality to the full Power BI service.

Scorecards allow users to track and share goals. These goals can be dynamically driven by data and rules to automatically track progress.

In addition to understanding dashboards, apps, and scorecards, we have also taken an in-depth look at security within...

Questions

As an activity, try to answer the following questions on your own:

• What is a dashboard and what purpose does it serve?
• Which types of tiles can be added to dashboards?
• Which tiles allow for the creation of a data alert?
• What is an app and why would you use one?
• What are the two publishing methods that can be used with apps?
• Once an app has been published, how can the app be modified?
• What are the three main security/permission levels within the Power BI service?
• What are the four roles that are available for workspaces?
• What is the hierarchy of objects within the Power BI service?
• What are the five permissions that are available for objects?

Further reading

To learn more about the topics that were covered in this chapter, please take a look at the following references:

• Introduction to dashboards for Power BI designers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-dashboards
• Intro to dashboard tiles for Power BI designers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-dashboard-tiles
• Add images, text, video, and more to your dashboard: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-dashboard-add-widget
• Real-time streaming in Power BI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-real-time-streaming
• Data alerts in the Power BI service: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-set-data-alerts
• Publish an app in Power BI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-create-distribute-apps
• Get started with goals in Power BI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/service-goals-introduction