How to Create a Dashboard in Power BI

Power BI dashboards give you a high-level, single-page view of your most important business metrics. They're designed for at-a-glance monitoring, not deep-dive analysis. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to create your first dashboard, from connecting your data to arranging your final visuals.

First, What's the Difference Between a Power BI Dashboard and a Report?

This is a common point of confusion, so let's clear it up. Think of it like this: a report is the detailed book, and a dashboard is the executive summary on the cover.

• Power BI Reports: These are multi-page, interactive deep dives into a specific dataset. You build them in Power BI Desktop. You can use lots of slicers, filters, and drill-throughs to explore every detail. Each page can have multiple detailed charts and tables.
• Power BI Dashboards: These are single-page canvases that display visualizations, which are called "tiles." They are built in the Power BI Service (the web version). Their main goal is to consolidate and display the most important metrics from one or more reports. They are less about deep exploration and more about providing a quick, real-time overview of business health.

You can't create a dashboard without first creating at least one report. The visuals on a dashboard are "pinned" from your reports.

Before You Build: A Quick Planning Checklist

Jumping straight into building a dashboard without a plan is like taking a road trip without a map. Before you connect any data, ask yourself two simple questions:

1. Who is this for? A dashboard for a sales manager tracking team performance will look very different from one for a marketing director monitoring campaign ROI. The audience dictates everything.
2. What one question must it answer? Don't try to cram every metric you have onto a single page. A powerful dashboard has a clear purpose. It might be, "Are we hitting our quarterly sales targets?" or "Which marketing channels are driving the most website traffic?" Everything on the dashboard should contribute to answering that core question.

A little planning up front saves you huge amounts of time later on.

Step 1: Get Your Data into Power BI Desktop

Dashboards start with data. You'll build your initial visuals in Power BI Desktop, the free application you can download for Windows. First, you need to connect to a data source.

For this example, we’ll assume we're using a simple Excel spreadsheet with sales data containing columns like Date, Product, Sales Rep, Region, and Revenue.

1. Open Power BI Desktop.
2. On the Home ribbon, click Get Data.
3. Select your data source. For our example, choose Excel workbook and click Connect.
4. Navigate to your file, select it, and click Open.
5. The Navigator window will appear. Check the box next to the sheet or table containing your data and click Load.

Power BI will now load your data, and you'll see your fields appear in the Fields pane on the right side of the screen.

Step 2: Create a Report with Visuals to Pin

Remember, dashboards are built from reports. So, our next step is to create a simple report with a few charts that we will later pin to our dashboard. We’ll create a basic sales report page.

You are now in the Report View. The blank canvas in the middle is where you build your visuals.

Create a Card for Total Revenue

Cards are perfect for displaying a single, important number.

• In the Visualizations pane, click the Card icon.
• A blank visual will appear on the canvas. With it selected, go to the Fields pane and drag your Revenue field onto the "Fields" area in the Visualizations pane.
• Power BI will instantly sum up your revenue and display it. You can resize this card and move it anywhere on the page.

Create a Bar Chart for Revenue by Region

Bar charts are great for comparing values across different categories.

• Click on a blank area of the report canvas to deselect the card visual.
• In the Visualizations pane, click on the Stacked column chart icon.
• With the new visual selected, drag the Region field to the Y-axis and the Revenue field to the X-axis in the customization area.
• You now have a simple bar chart showing your top-performing regions.

Create a Line Chart for Revenue Over Time

Line charts beautifully illustrate trends over a period.

• Click on a blank area of the canvas again.
• In the Visualizations pane, select the Line chart icon.
• Drag your Date field to the X-axis and Revenue to the Y-axis.
• Power BI will automatically create a date hierarchy, allowing you to see revenue by year, quarter, month, and day.

You now have a simple report page with three useful visuals. It's time to publish it so we can build our dashboard.

Step 3: Publish Your Report to the Power BI Service

Dashboards can only be created and viewed in the Power BI Service, which is the cloud-based, online version of Power BI. You need to publish your report there from Power BI Desktop.

1. In Power BI Desktop, go to the Home tab.
2. Click Publish.
3. If you're not already signed in, Power BI will prompt you to enter your work or school account details.
4. Once signed in, select a destination workspace. My workspace is your personal default. Click Select.
5. Once it's done, you’ll get a success message with a link to open the report in the Power BI Service. Click it.

Your web browser will open a new tab showing your report exactly as it looked in the desktop app.

Step 4: Pin Tiles to Create Your Dashboard

Now for the main event! With your report open in the Power BI Service, you can start building the dashboard by "pinning" visuals to it.

1. Hover your mouse over a visual, like the "Total Revenue" card you created.
2. A few icons will appear in the top-right corner of that visual. Click the Pin visual icon (it looks like a thumbtack).
3. A "Pin to dashboard" dialogue box will appear. Since this is your first one, select New dashboard and give it a name, like "Sales Overview."
4. Click Pin.
5. You'll get a small pop-up confirming it's pinned. You can now pin the other visuals. Hover over your "Revenue by Region" bar chart and click the Pin visual icon again.
6. This time, select Existing dashboard and make sure "Sales Overview" is selected. Click Pin.
7. Do the same for your line chart.

Step 5: View and Arrange Your Dashboard

You’ve pinned your key visuals. Now it’s time to see the finished product.

1. On the left-hand navigation pane in Power BI Service, find the workspace where you saved the dashboard (e.g., "My workspace").
2. Click on the name of your new dashboard, "Sales Overview."
3. You'll see your three pinned visuals, called "tiles," arranged on a single canvas.

From here, you can customize the layout:

• Move Tiles: Click and drag any tile and move it around the canvas.
• Resize Tiles: Click on a tile and then click and drag one of its corners to make it bigger or smaller.

When someone clicks a tile on a dashboard, it will take them directly to the underlying report it came from, allowing them to drill down and explore the data in more detail if needed.

Bonus Tip: Pinning a Live Report Page

Want a dashboard tile that is fully interactive, with working slicers and filters? You can pin an entire report page.

1. Go back to your report in the Power BI Service.
2. In the top menu bar, click the three-dot menu (...) and choose Pin to dashboard.
3. This pins the whole page as a single, large tile. Tiles pinned this way stay in sync with the report, if you use a slicer on the report, the live tile shows the change.

Final Thoughts

Creating a dashboard in Power BI involves a clear process: you connect your data, build visuals in a report on the Desktop app, publish that report to the Power BI Service, and then pin your desired visuals to a dashboard canvas. It puts all your most important metrics in one place, making it easy to monitor performance without getting lost in the weeds.

The learning curve for tools like Power BI can be steep - you have to design reports, manually publish them, and configure dashboards. We built Graphed to simplify that process entirely. Instead of manual setup, you can just connect your data sources (like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce) once and then ask questions in plain English - like "create a dashboard showing Facebook Ads spend vs. revenue last month" - and an interactive, beautiful dashboard is built for you in seconds, no report designers or learning needed.