Using Dashboards and Apps and Implementing Security

Believe it or not, there is life after Power BI Desktop. Although the utility of any good report largely depends on its development, your report will be incomplete or dysfunctional if you don’t know how to manage, distribute, or apply some level of security to it. This is because many companies are strict about allowing users to only view or access authorized data. So, keeping this in mind will give you the tools to defend yourself if these topics are touched upon in any interview questions.

In this chapter, you will learn about Power BI dashboards, how to create them by adding pins from different reports, and understand the difference between dashboards and reports. Additionally, you will learn how to use Power BI apps to distribute your reports before we delve into implementing row-level security (RLS) within Power BI.

The topics we will cover in this chapter are as follows:

• Dashboards versus reports
• Creating...

Technical requirements

• Power BI Free license
• Power BI Desktop installed on your PC:
  • From the web: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=58494
  • From the Microsoft Store: https://aka.ms/pbidesktopstore

Dashboards versus reports

In the Power BI ecosystem, a dashboard is a page with visual objects in the form of tiles. These tiles aim to provide valuable insights. In general, the purpose of dashboards is to display information in one place. So, in Power BI, they are created on a single canvas or page, helping you view consolidated information from one or multiple reports.

Here are some key differences between the two:

• Data consolidation: So far, we have covered topics that are specific to creating Power BI reports connected to a dataset. However, sometimes, we may need to view information from different reports in one place. Power BI dashboards can assist with this since you can have visual objects from different reports integrated into a single location.
• Cross filters: An essential part of Power BI reports is applying cross filters through a slicer or the filter pane. This allows you to view filtered information in a single visual object. For instance, if you have a...

Creating a dashboard in Power BI

To create a dashboard, you must log in with your Power BI account, go to the workspace where you want to create it, click on New, and then select Dashboard, as shown in Figure 10.2:

Figure 10.2: The Dashboard option in Power BI

Then, a pop-up window will appear, asking you to name the dashboard. Enter any name you desire and click Create.

Once you’ve done this, you will see a blank canvas where you can add the tiles that will form part of your dashboard. These tiles can come from a report, though you can add custom tiles such as web content, images, texts, or videos. Refer to Figure 10.3 for reference:

Figure 10.3: An empty dashboard with tiles options expanded

In addition to these options, you can also add real-time data from a streaming dataset, Azure Stream, or PUBNUB.

Adding pins

Dashboards are composed of tiles, and each tile represents a visual object. To add a tile that includes a report visual, you must go to the report that contains it. Each supported visual in the report will have an icon at the top that allows you to add it to the dashboard that you have already created. However, first, let’s learn how to add tiles directly to the dashboard.

Note

Note that only visuals to show data points can be added as a tile in a Power BI dashboard. This means that buttons or shapes are not supported. As shown in Figure 10.1, filtering is not supported either.

Adding a text box

Figure 10.4 shows a demo dashboard to which we have added a tile with text that serves as a title. We achieved this by clicking on Edit | Add a Tile | Text box:

Figure 10.4: Adding text to a Power BI dashboard

Adding an image

In addition to text, you can also add images. As shown in Figure 10.5, we added the Airbnb logo to the dashboard...

Sharing content through Power BI apps

Part of the magic of Power BI lies in sharing your dashboards and reports with your coworkers and collaborators. You can do this through workspaces or via Power BI apps. However, these two ways of sharing content have their differences. Let’s explore them.

Apps versus workspaces

When discussing sharing content using workspaces or apps, you may have questions about the difference between the two.

Workspaces are the classic way of sharing reports in Power BI. A workspace is essentially a folder where you can add files; these can be reports, datasets, dashboards, datamarts, dataflows, and even Excel documents, as you saw in the previous section. Each user accessing this workspace can individually access the reports to perform their analysis. However, at some point, it becomes tedious for users to deal with multiple browser tabs or navigate between reports. This situation can be addressed with Power BI apps.

Unlike workspaces, a...

Implementing RLS

Companies will always ensure that the right users have the right access. In the previous section, you saw the potential use of audiences as part of apps to restrict or allow the visibility of certain elements. However, even if you allow a user to view a particular report, there are situations where you need to limit the visibility of specific data within the model. In Power BI, this is called RLS.

RLS restricts data in the model based on certain defined rules. In other words, multiple users accessing the same report can see different data.

For example, let’s consider a scenario where you want to analyze data from Airbnb properties in New York City. Your team is made up of four people, and the properties have been distributed among them based on neighborhoods. You have only one report, and you don’t want to create separate reports for each group of properties. The goal is to use the same report and apply restrictions to each team member. This is...

Q&A

The distribution of reports and dashboards is an important part of the data analyst role. Your report may be well-crafted, but if you don’t know how to share it with your coworkers, or worse yet, if you share it with the wrong coworkers, the work is incomplete or simply poorly done. Therefore, it’s important that you prepare to be bombarded with questions related to the security and distribution of reports and dashboards in Power BI.

Below are some of the possible questions surrounding these topics:

Question 1: If Power BI reports already exist, in what situations are Power BI Dashboards used?

Answer: Power BI reports allow for detailed analysis of information, enabling you to slice and dice data within the report itself. However, dashboards display aggregated metric information that needs constant monitoring for the business. These can contain data from one or multiple sources, making them ideal for visualizing metrics that change constantly, such as...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about dashboards, how to create them, their purpose, and how to add content to them. You also gained a solid understanding of the differences between dashboards and reports in Power BI.

As dashboards are created of pins, you also learned about the different types of pins and how to add them to a dashboard.

Then, you saw the benefits of using Power BI apps to share your reports and highlighted some key differences between workspaces. Lastly, I showed you what RLS is and how to use it so that multiple users can see different filtered data in the same report based on roles.

In the next chapter, we will move away from the technical aspects and delve into the world of HR. Here, you will gain insights into how to prepare for the job interview process.