How to Pin a Visual in Power BI

Creating a go-to master dashboard with all your key metrics in one place is one of the most powerful things you can do in Power BI. The secret to making that happen is learning how to "pin" your visuals. This guide will walk you through exactly what pinning is, why it's so useful, and the step-by-step process for adding visuals from your reports to a centralized dashboard.

What Does "Pinning" Mean in Power BI?

In Power BI, your work is generally split between two main areas: Reports and Dashboards. Understanding this distinction is the key to understanding pinning.

• Reports are detailed, multi-page explorations of a single dataset. This is where you build your charts, tables, and slicers to dig deep into the data.
• Dashboards are single-page canvases designed for monitoring and getting an at-a-glance view of your most important numbers.

Pinning is the action of taking a single visual (like a chart or a KPI card) from a detailed report and placing it onto a dashboard. Think of it like a bulletin board. You might have a detailed sales report, a separate marketing analytics report, and another report for website traffic. Pinning lets you take the most important chart from each of those reports and "pin" it to your master dashboard so you can see your most critical KPIs in one spot.

Each pinned visual on a dashboard is called a "tile." This tile serves as a snapshot that is regularly updated and also acts as a shortcut, clicking on a tile takes you directly back to the original report it came from for further analysis.

Why You Should Pin Visuals to a Dashboard

Pinning isn’t just a neat trick, it’s a core feature that unlocks the true value of Power BI for business monitoring. Creating a dashboard filled with pinned visuals gives you several strategic advantages.

Create a Centralized Hub for Your KPIs

The most significant benefit is the ability to create a single source of truth. Your Head of Sales might not need to see the nitty-gritty details of your latest email campaign, but they do want to see the "Revenue by Channel" chart from the marketing report next to the "Deal Win Rate" visual from the sales report. Dashboards let you pull together metrics from different departments and datasets to tell a complete business story.

Enable At-a-Glance Monitoring

Dashboards are designed for quick consumption. Instead of having to open three different reports and navigate to specific pages every morning, you can just open one dashboard to see if everything is on track. This command-center view is perfect for daily stand-ups, quick reviews with leadership, or simply keeping a constant pulse on business health without getting lost in the weeds.

Easier, More Focused Sharing

Sending a C-level executive a dense, five-page report can be overwhelming. They often just need the headline numbers. A dashboard is the perfect solution. You can design it to show only the most critical, high-level metrics your stakeholders care about. It presents the summary, and if they have questions, they can always click a tile to be taken to the detailed report.

Set Up Data-Driven Alerts

One of the most powerful and often overlooked features of Power BI dashboards is the ability to set alerts. You can configure an alert on certain types of tiles (specifically cards, gauges, and KPIs) to notify you via email when a metric crosses a threshold you define. For example, you could get an alert if your daily sales drop below $10,000 or if your customer churn rate exceeds 2%. These alerts only work on dashboard tiles, not on visuals within a report.

How to Pin a Visual in Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Ready to build your first dashboard? The process is very straightforward. It’s important to note that pinning is done in the Power BI Service (the online version at app.powerbi.com), not in Power BI Desktop.

1. Open Your Report in Power BI Service Navigate to the workspace containing your report and open it. Find the specific page with the visual you want to add to your dashboard.
2. Hover Over the Visual to Reveal the Icons Move your mouse cursor over the chart, graph, or card you wish to pin. A small menu of icons will appear in the top-right corner of the visual's container.
3. Click the Pin Icon Look for the icon that looks like a thumbtack — this is the "Pin visual" icon. Click it.
4. Choose a Destination Dashboard After clicking the pin icon, a pop-up window will appear asking you where you want to pin the visual. You have two options:
5. Click "Pin" and Go to Your Dashboard Once you've selected a destination, click the "Pin" button. You’ll get a small confirmation message pop-up, which often includes a "Go to dashboard" button for quick navigation. Your visual is now a new tile on that dashboard!

A Faster Method: Pinning an Entire Report Page

What if you want your dashboard to essentially be an interactive mirror of a specific report page, including all its visuals and slicers? Power BI has a feature for that called "Pin Live Page."

To do this, open your report in Power BI Service, and instead of clicking a single visual, go to the top right of the menu bar and click the ellipses (...). From there, select Pin a live page. You'll be asked to choose a destination dashboard just like before.

The key differences are:

• Pinning a single visual creates a static tile that links back to the report.
• Pinning a live page creates a single large tile that contains the entire interactive report page. You can click on slicers and interact with visuals right there on the dashboard without having to leave.

Tips and Best Practices for Pinned Visuals

Once you've pinned your first few visuals, you can start optimizing your dashboards. Here are a few tips to make them more effective.

Understand How Tiles Work

When you pin a visual, you’re creating a copy or "snapshot" of it. This tile will update automatically whenever the dataset behind the original report refreshes. Clicking on the tile will always take you back to the source report, which is incredibly useful for drilling down into the data when a high-level number on the dashboard sparks a new question.

Resize, Move, and Rename Your Tiles

Your dashboard canvas is fully customizable. You can click and drag the corners of any tile to resize it, making more important metrics larger. You can also drag and drop tiles to rearrange them into a logical flow. Furthermore, click the ellipses (...) on any tile to "Edit details." This allows you to change the title, add a subtitle for more context, or even set a custom link so clicking the tile takes your user to a different URL entirely.

Keep Dashboards Lean and Focused

The temptation might be to pin every single visual you’ve ever created. Resist this urge! A cluttered dashboard is an ineffective dashboard. The goal is to provide clarity, not confusion. Design each dashboard with a specific purpose or audience in mind. For example, a Marketing Dashboard might focus on lead generation and campaign ROI, while a Sales Dashboard would highlight pipeline velocity and quarterly quota attainment.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to pin visuals is a fundamental skill that transforms Power BI from a simple reporting tool into a dynamic business monitoring system. By gathering your key metrics from various reports onto a single dashboard, you create a powerful, at-a-glance view that helps you and your team make faster, more informed decisions.

While pinning is perfect for building your command center within Power BI, it still relies on you to manually build all the reports, understand the tooling, and navigate the platform's complexities. At Graphed, we created a way for teams to get answers from their data in seconds, not hours. Instead of clicking through menus to build and pin visuals one by one, you just connect your data and ask in plain English, "create a dashboard showing my top ad campaigns by revenue and sales conversions by rep." We instantly build live, shareable dashboards from all your sources — empowering everyone on your team to get the insights they need without the steep learning curve.