How to Publish a Power BI Report as a Dashboard

Building a multi-page interactive report in Power BI Desktop is just the first step. To truly empower your team or stakeholders with clear, at-a-glance insights, you need to turn your detailed analysis into a centralized dashboard in the Power BI Service. This article provides a complete guide on how to publish your reports and use their components to create a powerful, shareable Power BI dashboard.

Understanding the Difference: Power BI Reports vs. Dashboards

Before publishing anything, it's essential to understand the distinction Power BI makes between a report and a dashboard. They serve very different purposes and getting this right is the foundation of effective business intelligence with the tool.

What is a Power BI Report?

Think of a Power BI report as a detailed, multi-page deep dive into a dataset. This is what you build in the Power BI Desktop application. Reports are designed for exploration and in-depth analysis. Key characteristics include:

• Multi-page: A single report can have dozens of pages, with each page focusing on a different aspect of the data (e.g., one page for sales overview, one for regional performance, one for product-level detail).
• Interactive & Sliceable: Reports are full of slicers, filters, and cross-filtering capabilities. Clicking on one visual element dynamically filters all other visuals on the same page.
• Designed for Analysis: The purpose of a report is to allow a user to dig into the details, ask questions, and uncover the "why" behind the numbers.

A report is like a reference book. It contains all the necessary information, well-organized into chapters, but you need to open it and flip through the pages to find specific answers.

What is a Power BI Dashboard?

A dashboard, in contrast, is a single-page storytelling canvas. It exists only in the Power BI Service (the cloud-based version) and is designed for monitoring key metrics. Its purpose is to provide a high-level, consolidated view of your business at a glance. Key characteristics include:

• Single Page: Dashboards are a one-page "highlight reel." You cannot add multiple pages. The goal is to present the most critical information without requiring clicks or navigation.
• Consolidated View: You can "pin" visuals from multiple different reports onto a single dashboard. This allows you to create a central hub that might show KPIs from sales, marketing, and finance reports all in one place.
• Designed for Monitoring: The goal of a dashboard is to give leadership or stakeholders a quick, easy-to-digest summary of performance. It answers the "what," not necessarily the "why."

If a report is the reference book, the dashboard is the executive summary on the front cover. It gives you the main takeaways and tells you where you need to look for more detail.

Step 1: Publishing Your Report from Power BI Desktop

Your journey from a detailed analysis to a high-level summary begins in Power BI Desktop. Once your report is finalized and ready to be shared, you need to publish it to the Power BI Service. Essentially, you're uploading your file from your local machine to the cloud.

Here’s how to do it step-by-step:

1. Save Your Report: Before publishing, make sure to save the latest version of your work. Go to File > Save just to be safe.
2. Find the Publish Button: On the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop, you'll see a Publish button in the "Share" section. Click it.
3. Sign In (If Prompted): If you're not already signed into your Power BI account in the Desktop app, you will be asked to. You'll need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User license to publish to shared workspaces.
4. Select a Destination Workspace: A dialog box will appear asking you to choose a workspace. A workspace is a collaborative area in the Power BI Service for teams to work on content. For personal use or testing, select "My Workspace." If you're building this for your team, select the appropriate shared workspace.
5. Start the Publishing Process: Click the "Select" button after choosing your workspace. Power BI will then begin uploading your report and its associated data model. The process may take a few moments depending on the size of your file.
6. Review the Success Message: Once completed, you’ll get a success notification with two clickable links: "Open '[Your Report Name]' in Power BI" and "Get quick insights." Click the first link to open your newly published report directly in your web browser.

Step 2: Creating Your Dashboard by Pinning Report Visuals

With your report successfully published, you can now see it in the Power BI Service. From here, you can start building your dashboard. The primary method for doing this is called "pinning" - you're essentially taking a snapshot of a visual from a report and sticking it onto your dashboard canvas.

Pinning Your First Visual

1. Open Your Report in Power BI Service: Navigate to the workspace where you published your report and click on it to open it.
2. Hover Over a Visual: Move your mouse over a chart, graph, KPI card, or table that you want to feature on your dashboard. You’ll see a few icons appear in the top-right corner of that visual.
3. Click the Pin Icon: Click the small pushpin icon. This is the "Pin visual" button.
4. Choose or Create a Dashboard: A "Pin to dashboard" window will pop up.
5. Pin It: Click the "Pin" button. A small notification will pop up on your screen a moment later confirming the visual was pinned, with a link to "Go to dashboard."
6. Repeat for All Key Visuals: Continue this process. Move through your report (and even open other reports in the same workspace) and pin all the essential visuals you want to monitor. You can pin a single KPI card showing total sales, a line chart showing trends over time, and a bar chart showing top-performing products - all onto the same canvas.

This is where the power lies. You aren’t limited to one report. If your paid ads data is in one report and your organic traffic data is in another, you can pin visuals from both to create a single, unified "Website Performance Dashboard."

Step 3: Customizing and Managing Your Power BI Dashboard

Once you’ve pinned your visuals, you can customize the layout and functionality of your dashboard to make it more user-friendly and effective.

Arrange and Resize Your Tiles

Each visual you pin to a dashboard becomes a "tile."

• Rearrange: Click and hold any tile to drag it to a different position on the canvas. Place your most important metric - like total revenue - in the top-left corner, as this is where people naturally look first.
• Resize: Hover your mouse over the bottom-right corner of a tile until the resize arrow appears. Click and drag to make the tile larger or smaller to give more prominent visuals more space.

The goal is to create a logical and visually appealing flow that guides the viewer's eye through the most important information smoothly.

Understanding Tile Interactivity

By default, clicking on any tile is a shortcut. It immediately takes you out of the dashboard and into the underlying report page where that visual originated. This is the key "dashboard-to-report" workflow: see a summary on the dashboard (the "what"), and if a number looks odd or interesting, click on it to dive into the detailed report for analysis (the "why").

Edit Tile Details

For more control, you can edit individual tiles. Hover over a tile, click the three-dot "More options" ellipsis (...) and select "Edit details." From here, you can:

• Set Custom Links: By default, a tile links back to its source report. You can override this to have it open a different report, another dashboard, or even an external website (like a SharePoint document or a Google Sheet providing context).
• Modify Titles and Subtitles: Add more context by giving your tiles clear titles and subtitles directly on the dashboard. This helps users understand what they're looking at without having to guess.

Configure for Mobile

Many stakeholders will view dashboards on their phones. At the top of your dashboard, click the dropdown for "Web layout" and switch to "Mobile layout." Here, you can create a custom, vertically-scrolling version of your dashboard specifically designed for small screens. You can rearrange, resize, and even remove tiles for the mobile view without affecting the desktop layout.

Final Thoughts

By publishing reports and pinning visuals to a dashboard, you transform detailed, granular data into a high-level summary perfect for leadership and daily monitoring. This two-part system - deep-dive analysis in reports and at-a-glance monitoring on dashboards - is at the core of effective data storytelling in Power BI.

While Power BI is incredibly powerful, the process of designing, publishing, and managing reports still involves multiple steps and a steep learning curve. At Graphed, we’ve created a way to connect your data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce - and build real-time dashboards using simple, natural language. Instead of manual report building, you can just ask questions like, "Show me a comparison of marketing spend vs revenue by campaign" and get an interactive dashboard built for you instantly. This drastically cuts down the time from data to insight.