A Power BI dashboard is a single page, often called a canvas, that tells a story through visualizations. Because it's limited to one page, a well-designed dashboard contains only the highlights of that story. Readers can view related reports for the details.
Dashboards are a feature of the Power BI service. They're not available in Power BI Desktop. You can't create dashboards on mobile devices, but you can view and share them there.
Dashboard basics
The visualizations you see on the dashboard are called tiles. You pin tiles to a dashboard from reports, and each report is based on a semantic model. A dashboard is an introduction to the underlying reports and semantic models. Selecting a visualization takes you to the report and semantic model that it's based on. If you're new to Power BI, see Basic concepts for designers in the Power BI service.
Dashboards are a way to monitor your business and see all your most important metrics at a glance. The visualizations on a dashboard can come from one underlying semantic model or many, and from one underlying report or many. A dashboard combines on-premises and cloud data, providing a consolidated view of data.
A dashboard isn't just a pretty picture. It's highly interactive, and the tiles update as the underlying data changes.
Who can create a dashboard?
The ability to create a dashboard is considered a creator feature and requires edit permissions on the report. Edit permissions are available to report creators and to colleagues the creator grants access to. For example, if a coworker creates a report in workspace ABC and adds you as a member of that workspace, you and your coworker both have edit permissions. On the other hand, if a report is shared with you directly or as part of a Power BI app, you're consuming the report. You may not be able to pin tiles to a dashboard.
Important
You need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license to create dashboards in workspaces. You can create dashboards in your own My Workspace without a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license.
Dashboards versus reports
Reports and dashboards seem similar because they're both canvases filled with visualizations, but there are major differences, as you can see in the following table.
Capability
Dashboards
Reports
Pages
One page
One or more pages
Data sources
One or more reports and one or more semantic models per dashboard
Microsoft Power BI dashboards are different than Power BI reports. Dashboards allow report consumers to create a single artifact of directed data that is personalized just for them. Dashboards can be composed of pinned visuals that are taken from different reports. Where a Power BI report uses data from a single semantic model, a Power BI dashboard can contain visuals from different semantic models.
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