Does Power BI Have Dashboard Templates?

Thinking about using Power BI dashboard templates? While Power BI is an incredibly powerful tool for building custom reports, starting from a blank page can feel intimidating. The good news is, you don't have to. Power BI offers several ways to use templates to get started quickly, but they might not work exactly how you think. This article will walk you through what Power BI templates are, the difference between report and dashboard templates, and how you can use them to speed up your analysis.

What's the Difference Between a Power BI Report and a Dashboard?

First, let's clear up one of the most common points of confusion in the Power BI world: the difference between reports and dashboards. Understanding this is essential to understanding how templates work.

A Power BI Report is an interactive, multi-page deep dive into a specific dataset. Think of it as a comprehensive presentation where you can add slicers, filters, and drill-down functionality to explore the data from different angles. This is where you do the heavy lifting of your data analysis.

A Power BI Dashboard, on the other hand, is a single-page canvas. It presents a high-level, at-a-glance view of your most important metrics. These visualizations, called tiles, are "pinned" from one or more reports. Dashboards aren't as interactive as reports, their main job is to provide a quick summary or a "health check" of the business.

Because of this structure, what most people call "dashboard templates" are actually Power BI Report Templates. You build a detailed, beautiful report using a template and then pin the most important visuals to a new dashboard.

So, What's a Power BI Report Template?

A Power BI Report Template is a file with a .pbit extension. This isn't a finished report, it's a blueprint. A .pbit file contains everything you need for a complete analysis except the underlying data itself. This includes:

The pages and layouts of the report.
All the charts, tables, and other visuals.
The entire data model, including relationships, measures, and calculated columns.
All the Power Query scripts used to clean and transform the data.

When you open a .pbit file, Power BI prompts you to connect your own data source. It then runs your data through the template's pre-built structure, and - voila - your data populates the finished report. This makes templates incredibly useful for creating standardized reports that can be reused across different clients, departments, or time periods without reinventing the wheel.

Where to Find Power BI Report Templates

You have a few excellent options for finding templates, ranging from totally plug-and-play solutions to files you can download and customize.

Official Microsoft Offerings: Power BI Apps

If you're looking for the easiest, most straightforward experience, start with Power BI Apps. A Power BI App is a pre-packaged bundle that often includes a ready-to-go report, dashboard, and dataset specifically designed for a popular cloud service.

These are created by Microsoft or third-party vendors and are available on the Microsoft AppSource marketplace. For example, there are dedicated Power BI apps for services like:

Salesforce Sales Analytics
Google Analytics
Microsoft Dynamics 365
QuickBooks Online
Zenefits HR Analytics

Installing an app is simple. You find it in the "Apps" section of the Power BI Service, click "Get it now," and follow the prompts to connect it to your account for that specific service. Power BI handles the data pulling and connection for you, instantly delivering a professional-grade report and dashboard. This is the closest you can get to true 'plug-and-play' dashboard templates.

Third-Party Marketplaces and Communities

If Power BI Apps are too restrictive or you need a template for a custom data source, the wider community is your best friend. Many expert users and specialized companies share or sell high-quality .pbit templates.

Here are some great places to look:

Power BI Community Data Stories Gallery: The official Power BI Community has a gallery where users showcase their reports. Many of them share the template file for you to download and learn from. It’s a fantastic resource for inspiration and seeing what’s possible.
Dedicated Vendor Websites: Companies like Numerro, PowerBITips, and Agile-Analytics have built businesses around creating professional Power BI templates. Some are free, while others are premium products designed for specific industries like finance, e-commerce, or professional services.
GitHub: Many developers and analysts share their work on GitHub. A quick search for "Power BI template .pbit" can uncover some hidden gems.

Creating Your Own Corporate Templates

Sometimes the best template is the one you create yourself. If you're an agency creating reports for multiple clients or a company that needs reporting consistency across departments, building your own corporate templates is a game-changer.

Create a master Power BI report (.pbix file) complete with your company's branding, color palette, logo, and standard KPIs. Once it’s perfect, go to File > Export > Power BI template. This will save it as a .pbit file that the rest of your team can use as a starting point, ensuring all your reports look professional and consistent.

How to Use a Power BI Report Template (.pbit file)

Found the perfect .pbit file? Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to put it to work with your own data.

Step 1: Get Your Template File

This is the easy part. Download the .pbit file from a community site or have it sent from a colleague and save it somewhere you can easily find it.

Step 2: Open the Template in Power BI Desktop

Report templates are designed to be used with the Power BI Desktop application, not the online Power BI Service. Simply double-click the .pbit file you downloaded. Power BI Desktop will open and load the template structure.

Step 3: Connect to Your Data Source

This is the most important step. As soon as the template loads, Power BI will prompt you to connect to the data source it was designed for. This could be anything from an Excel file or a SQL database to a SaaS application.

For example, if you're using a Shopify Sales Report template, it might ask for connection details to your Shopify account or prompt you to load a specific CSV export from Shopify. The template file already knows exactly what to do with the data once it receives it. You just need to point it in the right direction.

Step 4: Customize and Refine Your Report

A template is a head start, not a finish line. Once your data is loaded, you have a fully functional Power BI report that you can tweak and modify to your heart's content. Maybe you want to change donut charts to bar charts, or add a page to analyze a specific marketing campaign. You have full control to adapt the report to your specific needs.

Step 5: Save and Publish

Once you’re happy with the report, save it as a standard Power BI file (.pbix). Now you can publish it to the Power BI Service by clicking the "Publish" button on the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop. From there, you can share it with colleagues and pin your favorite visualizations to a dashboard to create that high-level summary view.

Is Using a Template Always the Best Option?

Templates are powerful, but it’s helpful to understand their pros and cons before jumping in.

The Benefits (The Pros)

Massive Time Savings: Templates can get you 80-90% of the way to a finished report in a fraction of the time it would take to build from scratch.
Consistency & Professionalism: Using templates ensures that reports across your organization share a common design, color language, and branding, making them more professional.
Built-in Best Practices: Well-designed templates are often built by experts, incorporating smart dashboard design and data visualization principles that you might not have thought of yourself.
Accelerated Learning Curve: For beginners, pulling apart a complex template is one of the best ways to learn how measures are written in DAX or how advanced queries are structured in Power Query.

The Drawbacks (The Cons)

Data Structure Mismatches: The biggest potential frustration is when your data is not in the exact format the template expects. If a column is named differently or a value is in the wrong format, the visuals can break, requiring you to dive into Power Query to fix it.
Limited Flexibility: A super-specialized template might be hard to adapt to your unique business logic. Sometimes, starting from scratch can be easier than fighting with a template that doesn't quite fit.
Slightly Outdated Apps: Some of the pre-built Apps on AppSource for platforms can sometimes lag behind the latest API updates from the service they connect to.

Final Thoughts

So, does Power BI have dashboard templates? The answer is yes, through a combination of shareable report templates (.pbit files) and plug-and-play Power BI Apps from the marketplace. Understanding how to find and use these resources can save you countless hours and provides a fantastic foundation for creating high-impact, professional reports and dashboards for your business.

While Power BI templates are a fantastic shortcut, connecting data and building visualizations from scratch can still be a multi-step process. In many cases, you don't need a massive, pre-built report, you just need a quick answer. That's why we built Graphed. Instead of hunting for the right template and configuring data sources, you can just ask in plain English: "Build me a dashboard comparing my Google Ads CTR and Shopify sales this quarter." We connect to your sources and generate the charts and dashboards on the fly, getting you from question to real-time insight in seconds.