Power BI dashboards

In a previous “recipe” you’ve met PowerBI work environment and ways to create reports and dashboards. In the following post I will introduce you to the featured dashboards, favorites, groups and workspaces, display and filtering the content that appears in the menu. Also, there will be words and the additional options to edit, add content and share dashboards. Most of these options can be used in the free variant PowerBI service.

After we log in to PowerBI a dashboard will appear. Main menu, on the left, should be closed. To open or close menu we can use an icon that resembles three parallel lines. Above it is another menu which is used to access administrator settings of Office365 account linked to PowerBI.

Right below the menu there is an option Featured Dashboard, indicating the default dashboard. If we’ve not set featured dashboard PowerBI will open a first one in alphabetical order from menu Dashboards. By clicking Featured Dashboard a new screen will open with a list of all available dashboards. By choosing one of them, and then clicking Set Dashboard button we can determine featured dashboard. By clicking on the icon labeled “…” to the right will open a menu containing the option Disable featured. This option is recommended for the elimination of the featured dashboard.

Below is the Favorites option. It is used to mark favorite dashboards. Namely, in the top right corner of the window of each dashboard is a group of options. One of them is called Favorite and it is represented by an icon-star. By clicking on it we can move or remove dashboard from list of favorites. Clicking on the Favorites option itself displays a window with shortcuts to your favorite dashboards.

Workspace is a group of reports that together create a team of associates. Belonging to a group allows you to create reports and posting them to the dashboards. Also, each member of the group can watch and change reports and dashboards in the group. PowerBI groups are related to the company’s Office365 account. The user who creates a group becomes its administrator and therefore can add other users and assigns them rights, also invite other participants to join the group. It can manage reports and dashboards within the group. The default workspace is called My Workspace. By clicking on the “+” mark next to Group Workspaces it is possible to add the groups and  access their contents. This is functionality that is available only to users of PowerBI Pro license.

Below workspaces are three menus: Dashboards, Reports and Datasets. Search box allows you to enter a name or part of the name of any of these objects. It narrows the view only on objects that match search criteria. This helps us to find desired dashboard, report or dataset.

Clicking on the Show opens a menu containing three options: All Content (everything we’re allowed to access), My content (content that we have created) and Shared Content (content that someone shared with us). This option also allows us to narrow or expand the available sets, reports, dashboards …

In the upper right corner of each dashboard there are several useful options. Option Add Tile is used for adding new tiles to the dashboard, which can be text, image, video, link … Clicking the View Related displays related data sets and reports, and option Share is used to share dashboards with other users.  By clicking on the icon labeled “…” will display a menu with several options for handling dashboards. Also in this menu you can change the display mode (Web, Phone) in order to customize reports and dashboards to display on different devices.