Level 3 · Report, dashboard or analysis?

Three words get mixed up in every analytics team: report, dashboard, analysis. They answer different questions, and in Power BI one of them is also the name of a specific feature.

What you are working in

This quiz runs in a practice page, not Power BI. Power BI Desktop (Windows only) builds reports; Power BI Service, at app.powerbi.com with a work account, is where reports are published and where dashboards are made.

Three kinds of output

• Report: describes what happened, usually as tables and metrics over a period. “Sales by category for Q3.” Useful, complete, and it leaves the conclusions to the reader.
• Dashboard: a few KPIs, signals and their context, built around questions and action. “Are we on target, and where should I look?” One screen, read in seconds.
• Analysis: a deep, sometimes messy look at one question, with hypotheses tested along the way. “Why did Textiles returns rise?” It explains causes, then usually ends in a recommendation and a few charts that make it onto a dashboard.

Dashboards in Power BI Service

In Power BI the word also names an object you can only create in the Service:

1. Publish the reports from Desktop with Home → Publish.
2. In the Service, open a report, hover a visual and select Pin visual (the pin icon).
3. Choose New dashboard and give it a name, or pick an existing dashboard.
4. Repeat from the second report, pinning to the same dashboard.

To pin a whole page that stays interactive, use … → Pin to a dashboard from the report’s menu and choose to pin a live page.

What a dashboard is:

• one page of tiles, each pinned from a report (or from Q&A, an image, a text box),
• able to combine tiles from several reports and semantic models,
• linked: selecting a tile opens the report and page it came from,
• refreshed with its reports’ data, and readable in the Power BI mobile app,
• the place for data alerts on card, KPI and gauge tiles (“email me when return rate passes 7%”).

What it isn’t: there are no slicers and no filter pane on a dashboard, and tiles don’t cross-filter each other. Interactivity lives in the reports behind it.

Which one to build

need	build
a glance across several reports, alerts, phone	Service dashboard
exploring with slicers and drill-down	report
explaining why something happened	analysis, then a summary page

Common mistakes

• Looking for dashboards in Desktop. They’re a Service feature.
• Pinning everything. A dashboard with 30 tiles is a report without the interactivity.
• Slicer surprises. A tile shows the visual with the filters it had when pinned; changing a slicer in the report afterwards doesn’t change the tile.