What Are Tiles in Power BI?

A Power BI tile is a single, rectangular box on a dashboard that holds a specific data visualization. Think of your dashboard as a high-level summary, and each tile is a snapshot of one of your most important reports. This post will walk you through what tiles are, how they differ from standard report visuals, and how you can use them to build insightful dashboards.

What Exactly Is a Power BI Tile?

In the Power BI universe, the journey from raw data to insight typically involves creating reports and then summarizing them on dashboards. The tile is the bridge between these two worlds. It's a single chart, map, or metric card that you've "pinned" from a report onto a dashboard to get a consolidated, at-a-glance view of your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Imagine you have a detailed, multi-page sales report. You might have a line chart showing revenue over time on page one, a map showing sales by state on page two, and a card with the total number of new customers this quarter on page three. Instead of forcing your team to click through all three pages, you can pin each of those individual visuals as tiles onto a single sales dashboard. Now, your most important metrics are all in one place, creating an executive-level summary that’s easy to read.

Key Characteristics of Power BI Tiles:

• They live on dashboards: Tiles are the fundamental building blocks of a Power BI dashboard. You cannot have tiles outside of a dashboard.
• They are pinned from reports: The most common way to create a tile is by finding a visualization in a report and pinning it.
• They are snapshots: By default, tiles show the latest data from a dataset refresh. They aren't constantly streaming data in real-time unless configured for it.
• They link back to their source: When you click on a tile, it acts as a shortcut, taking you back to the original report where you can dig deeper into the data.

Tiles vs. Report Visuals: What's the Difference?

One of the most common points of confusion for new Power BI users is understanding how a visual on a tile differs from that same visual in its original report. While they may look identical, their behavior is quite different.

Interaction and Filtering

Visuals within a Power BI report are highly interactive. You can click on a bar in a chart to cross-filter all other visuals on the page, use slicers to narrow down the data, and drill down into hierarchies. Reports are designed for deep-dive analysis and exploration.

Tiles on a dashboard, however, are intentionally less interactive. Their main purpose is to display a key number or trend. Clicking a tile doesn't filter other tiles on the dashboard, instead, it navigates you back to the base report. The dashboard is for monitoring what’s happening, while the report is for exploring why it’s happening.

The one exception is a "Live Tile," where you pin an entire report page to a dashboard. This special tile retains all the interactivity of the original report page, including cross-filtering and slicers, right on the dashboard.

Source and Creation

Report visuals are built from scratch in the Power BI Desktop or a report editor in the Power BI service. You connect to a data source, drag and drop fields onto a canvas, and choose a visualization type. Tiles are not created from scratch, they are essentially bookmarks of existing report visuals.

How to Create a Tile in Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creating a tile is also known as "pinning." The process is straightforward and allows you to quickly build a dashboard from one or more reports.

1. Navigate to Your Report: Open the Power BI report that contains the visual you want to add to your dashboard. This must be done in the Power BI service (the web version), not Power BI Desktop.
2. Hover and Find the Pin Icon: Move your mouse over the visual you want to use. A small header will appear at the top-right of the visual. Look for the pushpin icon.
3. Click "Pin visual": When you click the pin icon, a "Pin to dashboard" dialog box will pop up.
4. Choose a Dashboard: You have two options here:
5. Confirm and View: Click "Pin." A small notification will pop up confirming that the visual was pinned. You can click "Go to dashboard" to immediately see your newly created tile in action.

That's it! Your tile now lives on the dashboard, ready for you and your team to monitor.

Managing and Customizing Tiles on Your Dashboard

Once a tile is on your dashboard, you aren't stuck with its initial appearance or position. Power BI offers several simple ways to customize and manage your tiles.

Resizing and Rearranging

Dashboards are a flexible canvas. Simply click and hold a tile to drag it to a different position. To resize it, hover over its corner or edge, click, and drag it to your desired dimensions. This allows you to make more important KPIs, like total revenue, larger and more prominent than secondary metrics.

Editing Tile Details

For more advanced options, hover over a tile and click the three dots ("...") for "More options." From here, you can select "Edit details."

This opens the Tile details pane, where you can configure:

• Title and Subtitle: Change the display text to be clearer or more descriptive. For example, instead of the default "Sum of Sales Amount by Month," you could simplify it to "Monthly Sales Trend." You can also add a subtitle to provide more context.
• Custom Link: By default, clicking a tile takes you to the source report. You can override this to an external URL. This is incredibly useful for linking a tile to a relevant company wiki, a Google Sheet, or another application.
• Last Refresh Time: You can check a box to display when the tile's data was last updated at the bottom of the tile, which helps build trust with your audience.

Setting Data Alerts

For tiles that display a single number, like a Card, KPI, or Gauge visual, you can set automated alerts. In the "More options" menu, click the bell icon ("Manage alerts"). Here, you can create a rule that notifies you when a metric goes above or below a certain threshold. For example, you can get an email if inventory for a key product drops below 50 units, allowing you to react proactively.

Best Practices for Using Power BI Tiles

Creating tiles is easy, but creating an effective dashboard requires some thought and planning. Here are a few best practices to follow:

• Tell a Clear Story: Arrange your tiles logically. The most important, high-level KPIs should be in the top-left corner, as that’s where most people look first. Supporting metrics can follow below or to the right. Your dashboard should answer the most critical business questions without requiring the user to hunt for information.
• Don’t Overwhelm the User: The point of a dashboard is to simplify. Avoid cramming too many tiles onto a single canvas. A cluttered dashboard is confusing and defeats the purpose of an "at-a-glance" view. If you need more than 10-12 visuals, consider splitting them into multiple, more focused dashboards.
• Mix Your Visual Types: Create a more engaging dashboard by using a variety of tile types. Use big, bold Card visuals for your main KPIs, Line and Bar chart tiles for trends, Gauge tiles for tracking progress toward a goal, and Map tiles for geographic insights.
• Pin an Entire Report Page when Needed: If a report page has a lot of useful slicers and interactive elements that your viewers need, pin it as a live tile. This gives them the power of a report with the convenience of a dashboard.

Final Thoughts

Power BI tiles are the essential components that turn detailed, multi-page reports into a single, cohesive dashboard for monitoring your business. By pinning key visuals from your reports, you create a command center that provides quick, high-level answers to your most important questions, with the ability to click through for deeper analysis when something catches your eye.

The standard process of building reports, publishing them, and then pinning individual visuals can feel repetitive, especially when you manage data across many platforms. At Graphed, we’ve simplified this by using natural language to build dashboards instantly. Instead of spending hours in an editor, you can ask a question like, “Show me my Shopify sales versus Facebook Ads spend for this month on a line chart,” and we’ll create the visual for you on a live dashboard connected directly to your data, saving you from the manual work of building reports just to pin them.