Power BI – Introducing the Fundamental Building Blocks – Dashboards

The three main building blocks of Power BI are: dashboards, reports, and datasets.

A dashboard is something you create or something a colleague creates and shares with you. It is a single canvas that contains tiles and widgets. Each tile displays a single visualization that was created from a dataset and pinned to the dashboard.

In the navigation bar, "your" dashboards are listed under the Dashboards heading. In this context, "Your" means that you have access to them, not necessarily that you created them. Each dashboard represents a customized view of some subset of the underlying datasets.  If you own the dashboard, you'll also have access to the underlying dataset(s) and they'll appear in the navbar under Datasets. If the dashboard was shared with you, it has a sharing icon next to it and, depending on how it was shared, you may or may not see the underlying datasets listed in your navbar.

A dashboard can display visualizations from many different datasets, from many different reports, or pinned from other tools (e.g. Excel)

A dashboard can be created from scratch -- create a new blank dashboard and then get some data.

Dashboards can be imported with the dataset or are created as you connect to the dataset.

Why do people create dashboards?  Here are just some of the reasons:

·       to see in one glance all the information needed to make decisions

·       to monitor the most-important information about their business

·       to ensure all colleagues are on the same page, viewing and using the same information

·       to monitor the health of a business or product or business unit or marketing campaign

·       to create a personalized view of a larger dashboard with all the metrics that matter