An Introduction to Power BI Dashboard: A Brief Guide

The Power BI Dashboard is an integral feature of Power BI, enabling users to craft a personalised data view that highlights essential metrics and supports informed, data-centric decision-making. In the modern era where data management is paramount, organisations are on a constant quest for effective data handling solutions.

Microsoft’s Power BI stands out as a formidable business analytics tool that aids organisations in Data Analysis and visualisation. Infoclutch’s research indicates that approximately half of the global companies have adopted Microsoft Power BI. This blog aims to demystify Power BI Dashboards, offering an exhaustive tutorial on their creation and utilisation, exploring practical use cases, and discussing their benefits and potential drawbacks.

Table of Contents 

1) What is Power BI?  

2) Features of Power BI Dashboard

3) How to create a Power BI Dashboard?

4) What to consider before creating a Dashboard in Power BI?

5) Real-world applications of Power BI Dashboards  

6) Advantages and disadvantages of Power BI Dashboards  

7) Differences between Power BI Reports and Dashboards  

8) Conclusion  

What is Power BI? 

Microsoft Power BI is a robust analytics and business intelligence platform that empowers professionals to handle, scrutinise, and present large quantities of data. It facilitates the derivation of insights, formulation of conclusions, and dissemination of findings through reports and dashboards across different organisational divisions. Its user-friendly interface allows for simple drag-and-drop actions and offers diverse interactive Data Visualisation tools for crafting reports and dashboards.

These singular pages of multiple visual diagrams of data are called Canvases. The dashboards generate the diagrams from reports and abridged into a one-page format based on datasets.    

Users can interact with the Power BI Dashboard by drilling down on data points, filtering data and highlighting trends. It enables them to identify patterns and make data-driven decisions quickly. Power BI Dashboards are customisable and can be shared with other users, either internally or externally, with all stakeholders involved.   

They can also be accessed via mobile, allowing users to access critical data anywhere. Overall, Power BI Dashboards are a powerful tool for organisations to gain insights into their operations and improve their decision-making process.
 

Features of Power BI 

 Attributes of Power BI include:

a) Elevated speed and efficiency with small data sets.

b) A user-oriented interface, similar to the one known by Microsoft Office 365, that is highly intuitive and easy to use.

c) Compatibility with data sources such as Excel, Text/CSV, JSON, SQL Server databases, IBM DB2, MySQL, etc.

d) Integration with R programming language together with DAX measure and functions.

e) Integration of the solution with the Microsoft Azure cloud platform allows the identification of insights and patterns within the data sets.

How to create Power BI Dashboard? 

Creating a Power BI Dashboard involves steps that allow you to transform raw data into a comprehensive visual representation. Here’s a detailed guide on how to create a Power BI Dashboard:

a) Sign In to Power BI service: Start by logging into the Power BI service. If you don't have an account, you'll need to create one.

b) Connect to data sources: Use the ‘Get Data’ option from the ‘Home’ tab to connect to your data sources. These could be Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, or cloud services like Azure and Amazon Web Services.

c) Import and transform data: Import your data into Power BI once connected. You may need to use Power Query to clean and transform your data to ensure it’s in the right format for analysis.

d) Create relationships: Under the' Data' tab, set up relationships between different tables. This step is crucial for accurate data representation and analysis.

e) Design your report: Before creating a dashboard, you must design a report with visualisations. Use Power BI’s visualisation tools to create charts, graphs, and other visual elements.

f) Pin visuals to dashboard: After creating your report, you can create a dashboard by pinning these visuals. Hover over a visualisation and click the pin icon to add it to a dashboard.

g) Create a new dashboard: If you don’t have a dashboard, you’ll be prompted to create a new one. Give your Dashboard a name and pin the visual to it.

h) Arrange your dashboard: Once you have pinned the visuals, arrange them on your Dashboard. You can resize and move them to create a layout that effectively tells your data story.

i) Customise with filters and slicers: Add filters and slicers to your dashboard to make it interactive. This allows users to drill down into specific data points.

j) Share your dashboard: Finally, once your dashboard is complete, you can share it with others in your organisation. Power BI provides options to share and collaborate on dashboards securely.

Remember, a well-designed dashboard is not just about displaying data; it’s about presenting it in a way that’s easy to understand and actionable for the end-users. It should highlight the most important metrics and trends clearly and concisely.

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What to consider before creating a Dashboard in Power BI? 

Prior to crafting a Power BI Dashboard, consider these key points:

a) Identify key metrics: Decide what data needs to be highlighted, for example, the total sales, top products, and regional sales for a company focused on sales.

b) Customisation: Tailor your dashboard to your company's intentions and operations; avoid generic templates.

c) Power BI service: Understand that dashboards are exclusive to the Power BI service and cannot be accessed by Power BI Desktop.

Real-world applications of Power BI Dashboards   

Power BI Dashboards can come in all forms and cover various industries and topics. Here are some real-world industrial applications of Power BI Dashboards: 

a) Sales and marketing analytics: The sales and marketing teams can utilise Power BI Dashboards to monitor and analyse sales performance, marketing campaigns, consumer behaviours and product performance. Through these data, they may identify which aspects should be improved or developed into data-driven and more working plans.  

b) Financial reporting and analysis: Financial departments can use Power BI Dashboards to track revenue, costs, and other financial indicators. They can generate customised reports and track metrics such as cash flow, profit and loss, variance of budget, etc.

c) Supply Chain Management: Through Power BI Dashboards, one can analyse the supply chain data including inventory levels, supplier performance and delivery time. It can be designed to produce dashboards that give a clear view of the supply chain and let managers notice and solve problems promptly.

d) Human Resources: Power BI Dashboards could be used to analyse Human Resources (HR) Data such as employee turnover, performance metrics, and recruitment data. Besides that, they allow for the creation of Dashboards that offer a real-time perspective of crucial HR metrics, so managers can proceed with data-driven decisions about recruitment, retention, and performance management.

e) Healthcare: Healthcare sector can leverage Power BI Dashboards for patient Data Analysis, tracking disease outbreaks and monitoring hospital performance. It can also be employed in building Dashboards showing real time information such as length of stay, readmission rate and patient satisfaction.

6) Education: Power BI Dashboards can be used in the education and education technology sector to track student performance, analyse test scores and monitor teacher performance. They can also be used to create Dashboards that provide a more profound outlook into key education metrics such as student attendance, graduation rates and teacher effectiveness based on results.   

Advantages and disadvantages of Power BI Dashboards

As established, Power BI Dashboards can connect to a wide range of data sources and provides a drag-and-drop interface to create visualisations, analyse data and create custom and flexible Dashboards. However, despite its many advantages, Power BI Dashboards have some disadvantages that need to be considered before choosing it as a Data Analysis tool: 

Advantages 

This table provides a focused view of the key benefits of Power BI Dashboards: 
 

Disadvantages:

 These tables provide a focused view of the disadvantages of using Power BI Dashboards: 
 

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Differences between Power BI Dashboards and Reports 

Power BI Reports and Dashboards are two essential components of the Power BI suite for data visualisation and analysis. While they may seem similar at first glance, the two have significant differences. Below are the major differences between Power BI Dashboards and Reports: 
 

Conclusion

Overall, the applications of Power BI Dashboards are almost limitless. They can be used in nearly every industry to analyse and visualise data, monitor performance and make data-driven decisions. They are a valuable tool for businesses and organisations seeking summarised data and insights based on the data on a singular Canvas.

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