How to Preview Report in Power BI Desktop

Building a report in Power BI Desktop is one thing, but making sure it’s accurate, intuitive, and ready for your audience is another. Before you hit "Publish," you need to step into your users' shoes and experience the report just as they will. This article will walk you through the essential methods for previewing your Power BI reports, from basic interaction testing to checking mobile layouts and performance.

Why Thoroughly Previewing Your Power BI Report is Critical

Previewing a report isn't just a quick final glance, it's a vital quality assurance step. Rushing this stage is like publishing a book without proofreading. A proper preview helps you catch issues that could undermine the trust your audience has in the data and your analysis. Here’s what you should be looking for:

• Data Accuracy: Do the numbers add up? Do filters and slicers behave as expected, showing the correct data subsets? Previewing helps you spot calculation errors or flawed relationships in your data model.
• User Interactivity: Are your buttons, slicers, and drill-throughs working correctly? A key feature of Power BI is its interactivity, but broken or confusing navigation can frustrate users and hide valuable insights.
• Visual Clarity & Formatting: Is the text readable? Are the colors consistent and easy on the eyes? Do the tooltips provide useful context? What looks good on your large development monitor might be a cluttered mess on a smaller screen.
• Performance: Does the report load quickly? Sluggish performance is a major reason users abandon dashboards. Previewing with tools like the Performance Analyzer helps you identify slow visuals or complex calculations that need optimization.

The Primary Workspace: Interacting in the Report View

The good news is that Power BI Desktop is built for a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) experience. The default Report View, where you spend all your time building visuals, is your first and most important preview environment. You don't need to enter a special "preview mode" to start testing.

As you build, you should constantly be interacting with your report canvas as if you were an end-user. This isn't just about dragging fields onto visuals, it's about actively testing the report's functionality piece by piece.

Testing Your Interactive Elements

Interactivity transforms a static report into a dynamic analytical tool. Make sure every interactive feature works seamlessly. Click through everything!

• Slicers and Filters: Click every option in every slicer. Do they filter other visuals on the page as expected? Check for any unexpected behavior, like visuals going blank or showing errors. If you have "Sync Slicers" enabled, make sure updating a slicer on one page correctly updates the corresponding slicers on other pages.
• Cross-filtering and Highlighting: Click on different segments of your charts. For example, clicking the "USA" bar in a "Sales by Country" bar chart should filter or highlight data related to the USA in all other visuals on the page. Ensure this cross-filtering logic makes sense for the story you're telling.
• Buttons and Drill-throughs: If you've configured buttons for navigation or bookmarks, test each one. For drill-throughs, right-click on a data point on your summary page and confirm that the drill-through option appears and takes you to the correct detail page with the right context filtered.
• Tooltips: Hover over every single visual to check the tooltips. Is the default tooltip sufficient, or did you remember to add the specific fields you wanted? If you built a custom report page tooltip, does it display correctly and provide the in-depth information you intended?

Imagine you're a sales manager. Click on your own name in the "Sales Rep" slicer. Does the report update to show only your deals? Now, click on the "Q3" segment of a pie chart. Do your Q3 deals appear correctly? Testing these real-world scenarios is the best way to uncover issues.

Simulating the Mobile Experience with Mobile Layout View

Over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, and BI reports are no exception. A dashboard that looks pristine on your desktop monitor can be a jumbled, unusable disaster on a phone screen. Power BI’s Mobile Layout View is your dedicated tool for preventing this.

It lets you create a portrait-oriented version of your report specifically for phones. Your desktop layout remains untouched.

How to Use Mobile Layout View:

1. Navigate to the View tab on the Power BI Desktop ribbon.
2. Click the Mobile layout button.

This will switch your canvas to a phone-sized emulator. On the right, you'll see a pane named Page visuals, which lists all the visuals from your desktop report page.

From here, you simply drag and drop the visuals you want to include in your mobile view from the pane onto the phone canvas. You can:

• Resize and Reorder: Drag the handles of each visual to make them smaller or larger, and arrange them in a vertical, scrollable layout that makes sense on a phone.
• Exclude Unnecessary Visuals: You don't have to include every visual. Sometimes, it's better to create a simplified mobile report focusing only on the most critical KPIs. Any visual you don't drag onto the canvas will simply not appear in the mobile view.
• Test the Look and Feel: As you place visuals, you get an immediate preview of the mobile experience. If a text-heavy table is hard to read, consider replacing it with a mobile-specific version of the report, or simply excluding it from the mobile view for that page.

To go back to the standard view, just click the Web layout button right next to the Mobile layout button in the View tab.

Assessing Report Speed with the Performance Analyzer

A beautiful, accurate report that takes 30 seconds to load is a report no one will use. Performance is a feature, and the Performance Analyzer is your tool for diagnosing speed issues before you publish.

This pane records the time it takes for each visual on your report to load, breaking it down into specific components.

How to Use the Performance Analyzer:

1. Go to the View tab.
2. Check the box for Performance analyzer. A new pane will appear on the right.
3. In the Performance Analyzer pane, click Start recording.
4. Interact with your report. Click slicers, change filters, or click Refresh visuals in the pane to get a full analysis of the initial page load.

The pane will populate with a list of every visual and action. For each visual, you see how long it took separated by:

• DAX Query: The time it took for the query to run in your data model. Long times here might indicate a complex DAX measure that needs to be simplified or a poorly designed data model.
• Visual Display: The time Power BI took to actually draw the chart on the screen. Overly dense visuals with thousands of data points (like a scatter plot with no summarization) can cause this to be high.
• Other: The time spent waiting for other operations to complete.

Sort the results by Total Time (ms) in descending order to quickly find your slowest visuals. A single visual taking several seconds to load is a prime candidate for optimization. This process allows you to find and fix bottlenecks instead of just hoping your report feels "fast enough."

Advanced Previewing: Using Roles and Bookmarks

Previewing for Specific Audiences with "View as"

If your report uses Row-Level Security (RLS) to restrict data access based on a user's role, previewing it is non-negotiable. The "View as" feature lets you impersonate a role to ensure your security rules are working perfectly.

For example, if you have a "Regional Manager" role that should only see sales from their specific region, you need to test it.

1. Go to the Modeling tab on the ribbon.
2. Click View as.
3. In the dialog box, select the role you want to test (e.g., "Regional Manager"). You can even specify a particular user to simulate their exact view if your rules are based on user-specific UPNs (User Principal Names).
4. Click OK.

Your report will now refresh, showing you exactly what a person in that role would see. A yellow banner will appear at the top confirming which role you are viewing as. Click through the entire report in this mode to ensure no data is leaking that shouldn't be and that the filtered data makes sense. To stop viewing as that role, click "Stop viewing" on the yellow banner.

Testing User Journeys with Bookmarks

Bookmarks are saved states of a report page. They capture the current filter selections, slicers, and visibility of objects. They're often used to create a guided narrative or user journey through the data.

When previewing, make sure your bookmarks are capturing the state you intend. Click on each bookmark in the Bookmarks pane (enable it from the View tab) to see if it takes you to the correct view. If you have buttons linked to bookmarks, test those buttons specifically to confirm the navigation works as planned.

Final Thoughts

Effectively previewing your Power BI report is an active process that goes far beyond a simple visual check. It involves testing interactivity, simulating different user experiences like mobile viewing and security roles, and analyzing performance to ensure a smooth, reliable experience for your final audience. Incorporating these steps into your development workflow will elevate the quality and trustworthiness of your dashboards.

While Power BI is a fantastic tool for deep-dive analysis, the effort required to build, test, and optimize a report is significant, especially when you have to combine data from different places first. At our company, we wanted to streamline this entire process. We built Graphed to connect all your marketing and sales data sources in one place automatically, letting you build and share real-time dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. There’s no complex setup or manual visual building, which gives you back the countless hours normally spent just wrestling with the tool to get it to look and function correctly.