Dashboards for business users of the Power BI service
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APPLIES TO:
Power BI service for business users
Power BI service for designers & developers
Power BI Desktop
Requires Pro or Premium license
A Power BI dashboard is a single page, often called a canvas, that uses visualizations to tell a story. Because it's limited to one page, a well-designed dashboard contains only the most important elements of that story.
The visualizations on the dashboard are called tiles. Report designers pin tiles to the dashboard. In most cases, selecting a tile takes you to the report page where the visualization was created. If you're new to Power BI, start with Power BI basic concepts to get a good foundation. Hovering over an element on a dashboard displays a tooltip.
To view dashboards that colleagues share with you, you must have a Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license or the content must be shared with you from a workspace in Premium capacity. For more information, see Power BI license types.
The visualizations on a dashboard come from reports, and each report is based on one semantic model. You can think of a dashboard as an entryway into the underlying reports and semantic models. Select a visualization to take you to the report that was used to create it.
Advantages of dashboards
Dashboards are a great way to monitor your business, find answers, and see your most important metrics at a glance. The visualizations on a dashboard can come from one or more underlying semantic models or reports. A dashboard can combine on-premises and cloud data, which provides a consolidated view regardless of where the data lives.
A dashboard isn't just a pretty picture, it's an interactive canvas. The tiles update as the underlying data changes.
Dashboards vs. reports for Power BI business users
How you interact with Power BI depends on your job role. As a consumer or business user, you receive content, like dashboards, reports, and apps, from colleagues who are designers. Reports can be confused with dashboards because they're both canvases filled with visualizations, but there are major differences from a Power BI business user's point of view. The following table shows an overview of the different capabilities of dashboards and reports.
Capability
Dashboards
Reports
Pages
One page
One or more pages
Ask a question about your data (Power BI Q&A) field
Yes, almost always available
No Q&A field
Data sources
One or more report or semantic model per dashboard
A single semantic model per report
Filtering
No, you can't filter or slice
Yes, there are many ways to filter, highlight, and slice
Set alerts
Yes, you can create email alerts when certain conditions are met
No, you can't set alerts
Can see underlying semantic model tables and fields
No. Can export data but can't see the semantic model tables and fields in the dashboard itself
Yes. Can see semantic model tables and fields and values that you have permissions to see
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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Power BI service for business users 
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