How to Create a Power BI Dashboard

Building a Power BI dashboard lets you turn messy data into a single, clear snapshot of what’s happening in your business. It’s like creating a command center for your key metrics, all in one place. This article will guide you step-by-step through creating your first Power BI dashboard, from connecting your data to publishing your finished product.

First Things First: Power BI Report vs. Dashboard

Before we build anything, it's important to understand a key distinction in Power BI. People often use the terms "report" and "dashboard" interchangeably, but in Power BI, they are two different things.

• A Report is a multi-page canvas where you can perform deep-dive analysis. You can add slicers, filters, and dozens of different visualizations across multiple pages. This is where you do the detailed work of exploring your data. Reports are created in Power BI Desktop.
• A Dashboard is a single-page summary or a highlight reel of your most important metrics. Its visuals, called tiles, are "pinned" from one or more underlying reports. The goal of a dashboard is to provide a quick, at-a-glance view of the most critical numbers. Dashboards are created and viewed in the Power BI Service (the web-based version).

Our process will follow this logic: We will build a report in Power BI Desktop first, and then publish it to create our dashboard in the Power BI Service.

Preparing Your Data

A great dashboard is built on a foundation of clean, well-structured data. Garbage in, garbage out. Before you even open Power BI, take a few moments to make sure your data source is ready.

Choose and Clean Your Data Source

Power BI can connect to hundreds of data sources, from simple Excel spreadsheets to complex SQL databases. For this tutorial, we’ll assume you’re using a common data source like an Excel or Google Sheets file. Here's a quick checklist for your data:

• Keep it Tidy: Your data should be in a tabular format, like a database table. This means having one header row, with your data following in the rows below. Avoid merged cells or complicated layouts.
• Handle Blanks: Decide how to treat blank cells. Should they be zeros, or should the row be filtered out? It's better to make this a conscious choice than to let Power BI guess.
• Check Data Types: Make sure columns that should be numbers are formatted as numbers and dates are formatted as dates. Wrong data types are a common source of errors.

Taking ten minutes to clean your source file can save you hours of frustration later.

Step-by-Step: Creating Your First Power BI Dashboard

Alright, let’s get building. We’ll create a simple report with key visuals for a fictional business, publish it, and assemble our dashboard.

Step 1: Connect to Your Data in Power BI Desktop

The first step is always bringing your data into the Power BI Desktop application. This is the free software you install on your computer to build reports.

1. Open Power BI Desktop.
2. On the Home tab, click the Get Data button. You'll see a long list of potential data sources.
3. Select your data source. For this example, let's choose Excel Workbook.
4. Navigate to your file and click Open.
5. A Navigator window will appear, showing you the different tables or sheets inside your file. Check the box next to the one you want to use. You'll see a preview of the data.
6. You have two options: Load or Transform Data. Always choose Transform Data. This opens the Power Query Editor, a powerful tool for cleaning and shaping your data before you build visuals.

Step 2: Clean and Transform in Power Query Editor

Even if you've already cleaned your spreadsheet, the Power Query Editor is the best place to make final adjustments. Every change you make here is recorded as a step, so your data will be cleaned the same way every time you refresh it.

In the editor, you can:

• Remove Columns: Right-click a column header and select Remove if you don't need it for your analysis.
• Filter Rows: Click the dropdown arrow on a column header to filter out values, just like in Excel.
• Change Data Types: Select a column and use the Data Type dropdown in the Home tab to change it (e.g., from Text to Whole Number). Power BI usually does a good job of guessing types, but it's always good to double-check.

Once you're happy with your data's shape, click the Close & Apply button in the top-left corner. This loads your cleaned data into the report builder.

Step 3: Build Visuals in Report View

Now for the fun part. We’re in the Report View of Power BI Desktop. The main canvas is on the left, the Visualizations pane is on the right, and your data fields are in the far-right Fields pane.

Let's create a few simple visuals:

Total Revenue Card

Cards are perfect for displaying a single, important number.

1. Click the Card visual in the Visualizations pane.
2. Drag your "Revenue" field from the Fields pane onto the "Fields" area of the Card visual.
3. Power BI will instantly create a card displaying the sum of your revenue.

Revenue Trend Line Chart

Line charts are great for showing trends over time.

1. Click a blank area on the canvas, then select the Line chart icon.
2. Drag your "Date" field to the X-axis box.
3. Drag your "Revenue" field to the Y-axis box.
4. Voila! You have a chart showing how revenue has changed over time.

Sales by Product Category Bar Chart

Bar or column charts are excellent for comparing values across categories.

1. Select the Stacked bar chart icon.
2. Drag your "Product Category" field to the Y-axis.
3. Drag your "Sales" field to the X-axis.
4. You now have a clean comparison of which categories generate the most sales.

Continue this process to create any other valuable charts you need. Once your report page has the visuals you want to see at-a-glance, it’s time to move to the final steps.

Step 4: Save and Publish to the Power BI Service

Your report exists only on your desktop right now. To create a dashboard and share it, you must publish it to the Power BI Service.

1. First, save your file. Go to File > Save.
2. Next, in the Home tab of the ribbon, click Publish.
3. You'll be asked to choose a destination workspace. "My workspace" is your personal sandbox and is perfect for this.
4. Click Select. Power BI will upload your report. You’ll see a success message with a link to open it in the Power BI Service. Click it!

Step 5: Assemble Your Dashboard in Power BI Service

Now that you're in the Power BI Service (in your web browser), you'll see the report you just built. It looks exactly like it did on the desktop app. Now we finally create the dashboard.

1. Hover over a visual you want on your dashboard, like the "Total Revenue" card.
2. You'll see a small pin icon appear. Click it.
3. A "Pin to dashboard" window pops up. Select New dashboard, give it a name (e.g., "Executive Sales Summary"), and click Pin.
4. Do the same for your other visuals. When you pin your second visual, choose Existing dashboard and select the one you just created.
5. Once you've pinned all your desired visuals, navigate to that dashboard using the left-hand navigation pane.

You’ll see all your visuals arranged as tiles on a single page. You can drag and drop these tiles to rearrange them, and you can resize them by dragging the corners. Congratulations, you've just created a Power BI dashboard!

Tips for Designing a Great Dashboard

Creating a dashboard is easy. Creating one that is truly useful is an art. Here are a few best practices to follow:

• Start with the Questions: Before you drag any fields, ask yourself: "What questions does my audience need answered in 5 seconds?" Design the dashboard to answer those questions first.
• Place Key Info Up Top: The most important number (like total revenue) should be in the top-left corner, as this is where an English-speaking reader's eyes go first.
• Less is More: Avoid cluttering a dashboard with too many visuals. Aim for 5-9 highly relevant tiles. If you need more detail, that's what the underlying reports are for.
• Set up a Mobile View: In the dashboard settings, you can configure a mobile layout. This lets you reorder and resize tiles into a single, phone-friendly column so your team can view the dashboard on the go.

Final Thoughts

You’ve seen that creating a Power BI dashboard is a structured process: you prepare your data, build visuals in a Power BI Desktop report, publish it to the Power BI Service, and then pin those visuals to create your high-level dashboard. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for summarizing business performance in a way everyone can understand.

While Power BI offers incredible depth, we know the learning curve can be steep for those who aren't data professionals. That’s why we built Graphed. We connect to all your popular marketing and sales data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, and Salesforce - and let you build beautiful, real-time dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. Instead of learning Power Query and building visuals one by one, you just describe what you need to see, and Graphed creates the dashboard for you in seconds.