Events
Power BI DataViz World Championships
Feb 14, 4 PM - Mar 31, 4 PM
With 4 chances to enter, you could win a conference package and make it to the LIVE Grand Finale in Las Vegas
Learn moreThis browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
APPLIES TO:
Power BI Desktop
Power BI service
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.
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.
You can pin many kinds of tiles to dashboards:
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.
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.
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 | A single semantic model per report |
Drilling down in visuals | Only if you pin an entire report page to a dashboard. | Yes |
Available in Power BI Desktop | No | Yes. You can build and view reports in Power BI Desktop. |
Filtering | No. You can't filter or slice a dashboard. You can filter a dashboard tile in focus mode, but can't save the filter. | Yes. There are many different ways to filter, highlight, and slice. |
Feature content on colleagues' Home page | Yes | Yes |
Favorites | Yes. You can set multiple dashboards as favorites. | Yes. You can set multiple reports as favorites. |
Natural language queries (Q&A) | Yes | Yes, provided you have edit permissions for the report and underlying semantic model. |
Set alerts | Yes. Available for dashboard tiles in certain circumstances. | No |
Subscribe | Yes. You can subscribe to a dashboard. | Yes. You can subscribe to a report page. |
See underlying semantic model tables and fields | No. You can't see tables and fields in the dashboard itself, but you can export data. | Yes |
Events
Power BI DataViz World Championships
Feb 14, 4 PM - Mar 31, 4 PM
With 4 chances to enter, you could win a conference package and make it to the LIVE Grand Finale in Las Vegas
Learn moreTraining
Module
Create dashboards in Power BI - Training
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.
Certification
Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate - Certifications
Demonstrate methods and best practices that align with business and technical requirements for modeling, visualizing, and analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI.