In this writing, I like to share when I need to build a dashboard in Power BI service, instead of just sharing reports.
Situation
In one workspace, I have more than multiple Power BI reports and datasets. In each report, several card visualizations with some other visualizations are presented. For instance, under the Customer A's workspace, in Finance Power BI report, there are some card visualizations that describe current year revenue, previous year revenue, current year profit, and previous year profit. In Logistics Power BI report, there are some card visualizations that explain current year Inventory Accuracy ratio, previous year Inventory Accuracy ratio, current year OTD (On Time Delivery) ratio, previous year OTD ratio, and so forth. Finance department consumes Finance Power BI report, and Logistics department uses Logistics Power BI report.
Challenge
What happens if someone from outside of the customer's organization wants to see KPIs of the finance team and logistics team in order to evaluate the overall performance of the company together with CEO to prepare IPO, for instance? Do they need to open two Power BI reports?
Suggestion?
In most cases, when I communicate with manager level people, who are the main audiance of my Power BI reports, almost 100% of them want to see reports, not a dashboard. One of reasons is that they want to click and interact with report visualizations. And, when their boss (CEO) wants to see two or three different team's performance in one place, they usually ask me to create one more Power BI report that shows multiple teams' KPIs.
Solution
Dashboards in Power BI service can be created to gather the most critical KPIs, measures, and visualizations in a single area. Moreover, dashboards give an access point to the detailed Power BI reports that support each tile in dashboards.
Power BI dashboards are mainly consumed by executives and senior managers who require an insightful and consolidated KPIs. In many cases, different than just a manager level people, these stakeholders heavily depend on dashboards rather than seeing detailed Power BI reports. Such dashboards source from multiple Power BI reports built by using several datasets presenting different business units and functions such as Finance and Logistics.
Dashboards have many features that support to explain information in more insightful and intuitive way, but for now, knowing why dashboard is needed is crucial.
I hope this can help to start creating dashboards in your workspace in Power BI service.
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