Building a business dashboard continues to be a hassle in any BI tool due to the complexities of data silos, data cleaning, ETL process, and more. Power BI has helped overcome this hassle with its simple user interface and drag-and-drop options. Building dashboards and data visualizations without requiring to code is the greatest advantage of Power BI.
Interactive dashboards in Power BI
Big data is a major asset for which businesses require an appropriate tool to manage and process those data and present them as interactive visualizations. Doing so can help you utilize data, enhance decision making, transform business operations, and increase your organization’s productivity.
Are you among those companies with major data analysis issues? Then Power BI is the suitable solution that can effectively analyze data and provide interactive insights for you to make those types of coherent, visually immersive, interactive dashboards and visualizations.
Did you know that Power BI dashboards can help you understand your data in an easier manner and tell your business story in a single frame?
Build a great Dashboard
You can assemble all your crucial data elements into a Power BI dashboard, a single page sometimes referred to as canvas. The highlighted visualization on the dashboard is called the tiles that are pinned to the dashboard by report designers. This means the dashboard’s visualization comes from the reports and every report is based on a single dataset. A dashboard is a gateway into the underlying datasets and reports so that you can go to the report directly from the dashboard.
Using Power BI dashboards you can see your data and share insights across the company or embed them into your website or app. Simply put, you can gain value by leveraging the individual elements in the dashboard and understanding how they work together.
Custom Power BI dashboards
Power BI simplifies the data extraction and presentation processes in dynamic and interactive data visualizations through drag-and-drop functionality.
Listed below are several items that can be customized in your Power BI dashboards:
Machine learning
Power BI users can incorporate Azure Machine Learning, make ML models, and access text analytics and image recognition.
Cortana integration
You can integrate Power BI into Cortana—the digital assistant—to probe verbal questions in your natural language to access any information. This is especially good for users accessing Power BI through their mobile devices.
Security filters
You can set up access filters to ensure that viewers only see data and information relevant to them, which helps mitigate the risk of unauthorized access.
App navigation
The app navigation experience gives reporting teams the freedom to customize navigation for end users enabling them to quickly find content and understand relationships between various reports and dashboards.
Real-time data
You can update dashboards in real time, meaning data is streamed, offering viewers the capability to determine opportunities and solve issues on the go. Live data can be pushed from social media, business apps, or any other source from which time-sensitive information can be transmitted.
Publication and distribution
You can directly upload reports and visualizations to Power BI dashboards rather than sending large files or uploading them to the shared drive. Whenever the underlying dataset is updated, the dashboard data gets refreshed every time.
Quick Start
With an organized setup, you can immediately receive insights hassle-free. You can get started quickly as you don’t require any specialized training to play around with the Power BI dashboards.
Creating custom dashboards in Power BI
When you are using simple spreadsheets to create reports, understanding your business in depth can be challenging, if not outright confusing. Microsoft’s Power BI is a powerful visualization software that can transform raw data into actionable insights and lets you create custom dashboards to display the most important metrics and give complete visibility into your business to make informed decisions.
Given below are the steps to create custom dashboards in Power BI:
Data import
Data import is the first step to move data into Power BI. Click on the Get Data button at the bottom of the left corner of the screen then choose whether you want to import data from Excel, OneDrive, SharePoint, or Azure SQL database. Once you have imported the data Power BI generates a blank canvas with a menu to select visuals that best represent your metrics on the dashboard.
Select your visuals
Choosing the right visuals for the data and reports can help you highlight the essentials and prevent you from misleading your colleagues. Listed below are some of the common Power BI visualizations and their purposes:
- Pie charts – show the composition of a whole in percentages. For example, you can use pie charts on marketing dashboards to represent customer demographics.
- Bar charts – ideal for showing the comparison between different data categories. You can use bar charts to analyze sales product performance and monthly expenses.
- Stacked charts – allow you to present multiple data types within a single bar. Stacked charts can be a great option to highlight monthly budget breakdowns.
- Scatter plots – show the relationship between two attributes. For instance, you can use a scatter plot to represent how weather affects sales.
- Line graphs – great for tracking changes over time. You can use line graphs to plot annual revenue.
Attach visuals to your dashboard
You need to pin the most relevant chart or visuals to your dashboard while customizing it. To do that, you need to click on Add title> Create a visual> and select the Pin icon to attach it to your custom dashboard. After this step, you can drag and drop tiles to arrange them the way you like.
Dashboard themes
You can easily change the Dashboard theme and give your dashboards a new look. You can either select the basic themes that come with every Power BI subscription or download custom themes from the Microsoft Themes Library. Setting themes help reflect your company’s branding and you can differentiate dashboards based on other criteria, such as a project.
Know your audience
You can create effective dashboards relevant to specific users. For example, you can highlight monthly expenses, product performance, revenue, and more while creating an accounting dashboard. Power BI enables you to drill into reports and expand charts to engage your audience’s attention, so it’s better to keep your dashboards uncluttered with overwhelming information.
Dashboard sharing
You can share your dashboards with peers, colleagues, or decision-makers. The charts and visuals in Power BI will automatically update when you add, edit, or modify the imported databases allowing users to see the most updated data—a great feature for productivity and transparency.
PreludeSys’s experience in customizing Power BI dashboards
Data powers everything today, and Power BI dashboards help people understand data. PreludeSys is a trusted Microsoft Gold Partner that has helped many leading brands across industries such as healthcare, finance, and retail get the most out of data through a broad range of intuitive and interactive Power BI dashboards. We turn data from on-premise databases, Excel, and cloud-based data warehouses into visually immersive insights and help with the following:
- Discover critical metrics and measure important business aspects
- Share business and project performance statuses with team members
- Make more informed data-driven decisions with data in hand
Interested to learn more about how Power BI dashboards can add value to your business? Take the next step— Call us now!
