Building dashboard using Power BI

What are Dashboards?

A dashboard is a visual display of all of your data. While it can be used in all kinds of different ways, its primary intention is to provide information at-a-glance, such as KPIs.

A dashboard usually sits on its own page and receives information from a linked database. In many cases it’s configurable, allowing you the ability to choose which data you want to see and whether you want to include charts or graphs to visualize the numbers

Dashboard basics

The visualizations you see on the dashboard are called tiles. You pin tiles to a dashboard from reports.

Advantages of dashboards

Dashboards are a wonderful way to monitor your business and see all of your most important metrics at a glance. The visualizations on a dashboard can come from one underlying dataset or many, and from one underlying report or many.

A dashboard isn’t just a pretty picture. It’s highly interactive and the tiles update as the underlying data changes.

Creating a Dashboard in PowerBI

This dashboard will be created using various visualizations for different fields and it will be shown in the reports tab of Power BI.

Step 1: Import data to Power BI Dashboard

Without numbers, there is no data to visualize, so the third step of Power BI dashboard creation is to import data. To do so in your Power BI Desktop Dashboard press on Home > Get Data > Choose a data source > Connect.

Step 2: Format data in Power BI Dashboard

After you’ve selected your data source, the Power BI dashboard starts processing it and organizes what it has found in the new Navigator window. In the example below, you can see how Power BI found two components displayed on the left side of the window — Document and Ranking of the best and worst states for retirement.

Select the data that interest you to see a preview. Here you have a perfect chance to format your future Power BI data visualization by choosing Transform Data or press Load to visualize it as it is.

Step 3: Create Data Visualization in Power BI Dashboard

Here’s great news! After importing data to your Power BI dashboard it’s quite simple to create actual data visualization dashboard elements.

All you have to do is look at your right-hand Fields panel and check or drag-and-drop the desired field, like in this case Abbreviation, Affordability, Overall rank, State or Weather, onto the Power BI dashboard.

In case you want to create another Power BI dashboard that shows correlations between various values, just check the values you’re interested in visualizing in the Fields section we described below, and Power BI will automatically generate a data visualization.

You can choose the visualization type by simply clicking on any Bar, Pie or Donut chart or any other Data Visualization methods and types under the Visualizations tab on the right side of the panel.

Congratulations! You are done! Your Power BI Desktop Dashboard has been created! Keep adding other Power BI charts and graphs to your dashboard.