Creating Dashboards in Power BI

Currently in Preview in Power BI on Office 365 is the ability to create entire dashboard pages based on your connected Power BI data.

While this functionality is still in preview, it represents a powerful way to show different insights across your data and provide your business decision makers the information they need in one single pane of glass. Let’s take it for a spin and see how we can get these insights.

To start with the Preview, we need to sign up for it. You can sign up by accessing the “Introducing Power BI Dashboards” area on your Power BI homepage:

Image1

This will provision your new dashboard preview and will take up to 30 minutes to complete. Once it is finished, you will now have a dashboard site you can access:

image2

So, let’s dive right in and create our first dashboard. On the Quick Launch, click on “Get Data.” Out of the box, we have multiple ways to add different data sources to our dashboard. Also, since this is currently in preview, there will be other data sources added in the future that will help ensure you can access as many different data source areas as your organization needs.

The current data sources include: Excel, Salesforce, Zendesk, Dynamics, SendGrid, and Marketo. You can also add any data sources you currently have connected through Power BI, and there are developer tools to allow you to custom build any data connections you may need.

image3

For this example, I am going to upload a previously created Excel file that contains example data on sales information. By clicking on “Excel Workbooks” in the Get Data wizard, I can select any Excel workbook that has a data model or data connection and upload it into the dashboard:

image4

When the upload is complete, I will have two new items in my Dashboard Quick Launch. A new dataset based on the Excel sheet will be created, and a new dashboard based on the Excel file will also be created:

image5

The new dataset will allow me to explore the data that has been retrieved, as well as schedule or manually refresh the data. With the new dashboard, I can now create charts based on the data to fill out my dashboard. We can drill into creating these charts by clicking on the new dashboard area. This will pull up an area that will allow us to create our dashboard charts based on our dataset. While not nearly as powerful as using PowerPivot, there are some similarities in the usage. We can create charts by simply clicking on the columns we want to reference to build our charts:

image6v2

Once you have your chart created, you can add it to the dashboard by clicking on the pin icon:

image7

Now, we can look at our dashboard and see our visualizations all in one area.

image8

So far, there are a few limitations with the overall experience on the product I can see. The most glaring seems to be that each dashboard has to be tied to a specific dataset. But since this functionality is in preview still, I’m hopeful this will be an area that Microsoft will address. But, based on what they have in preview, I can certainly see value in this product for the future.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.