Dashboards and storytelling

A dashboard is not a page with every chart that fits on it. It’s a page somebody opens to decide something, to check that nothing is on fire, or to find out why a number moved. Which of those it is decides everything else: the KPIs, the layout, how often it refreshes, how many filters it needs, and what each title says.

This chapter is about those decisions. You start with purpose and audience: what the page is for, and which numbers a CEO, a sales lead, a marketing manager and a finance director each need. You tell a report, a dashboard and an analysis apart, including what “dashboard” means in Power BI Service, where it’s a canvas of pinned tiles. You sort real Harbor & Pine charts into strategic, operational and analytical pages, choose the better of two layouts, and pick the sentence that turns a chart into a story: context, conflict, insight, recommendation.

The numbers are the store’s own. Sales grew 15% in 2025, the app overtook the website as the biggest channel, November and December carry the year, and Textiles returns are mostly people changing their mind. A good dashboard makes points like these obvious in seconds.

Most levels are quizzes, some with charts drawn from the data. The boss level is DAX, in the practice report built into the page: the three KPI measures at the top of an executive page. Power BI Desktop runs on Windows only, so every lesson also gives the exact place to do it there.