How to Add a Tile in Power BI

Building a compelling Power BI dashboard starts with a single element: the tile. Tiles are the building blocks that transform a collection of data into a strategic overview of your business. This guide will walk you through exactly how to add, manage, and customize tiles, turning your reports into powerful, at-a-glance dashboards.

What is a Power BI Tile, Exactly?

Think of a Power BI tile as a single, rectangular snapshot of your data, pinned directly to a dashboard. It's a live window into a specific metric or visualization that lives within one of your reports. While a report can be a deep, multi-page document for thorough analysis, a dashboard is a single-page canvas designed for monitoring. Tiles are what bridge that gap, letting you pluck the most important charts and figures from your reports and place them side-by-side for a high-level view.

Each tile serves a purpose:

• It provides a quick, summary view of a key performance indicator (KPI).
• It acts as a shortcut. Clicking on a tile takes you directly to the underlying report where you can explore the data in more detail.
• It can display data from different reports, allowing you to create a mashup of your most critical metrics in one centralized place.

Fundamentally, tiles let you curate the story you want your data to tell, prioritizing the information that stakeholders need to see first.

Why Pin Visuals to a Dashboard?

You might wonder why you can't just share the report itself. While reports are essential for deep analysis, dashboards full of tiles serve a different, crucial function: quick monitoring. Business leaders and managers often don't have time to slice and dice data across multiple report pages. They need immediate answers to questions like, "Are we hitting our sales target this month?" or "How is our website traffic trending this week?"

Tiles make this possible by offering several distinct advantages:

• At-a-Glance Insights: Dashboards are designed to be consumed quickly. A well-organized set of tiles gives you the health of your business in a single glance.
• Centralized Hub: A single dashboard can contain tiles pinned from many different reports and datasets. You can see your sales data from a Salesforce report right next to your website traffic from a Google Analytics report in one unified view.
• Customization and Focus: You decide what's most important. You can resize, rearrange, and organize tiles to create a personalized command center tailored to your specific goals or your team's needs.
• Live Data: Tiles on a dashboard are not static screenshots. They update automatically as the underlying data refreshes, ensuring you're always looking at the most current information.

The Most Common Method: Adding a Tile from a Report

The primary way to create a tile is by "pinning" a visual directly from an existing Power BI report. This process is straightforward and allows you to build a dashboard piece by piece. Before you start, make sure you've already created and published a report to the Power BI service (the online version of Power BI), as this process doesn't work in Power BI Desktop.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Navigate to Your Report in the Power BI Service

First, log in to your Power BI account at app.powerbi.com. From the left-hand navigation pane, find the workspace containing your report and click to open it.

2. Find and Hover Over Your Chosen Visual

Once your report is open, find the chart, graph, map, or card that you want to add to your dashboard. As you move your mouse cursor over this visual, a small set of icons will appear in the top-right corner.

3. Click the Pin Icon

Look for the small thumbtack icon - this is the "Pin visual" button. Click on it. This action will open a dialog box called "Pin to dashboard."

4. Choose Where to Pin the Tile

The dialog box gives you two options:

• New dashboard: Choose this if you're starting a dashboard from scratch. You'll be prompted to give your new dashboard a name.
• Existing dashboard: If you already have a dashboard you'd like to add to, select this option. A dropdown menu will appear listing all of your existing dashboards. Simply select the one you want to use.

For this example, let's create a new one. Select "New dashboard" and give it a descriptive name like "Q3 Sales Performance."

5. Click 'Pin'

After a moment, a confirmation pop-up will appear near the top-right of your screen, letting you know the visual was pinned successfully. It also gives you two options: "Go to dashboard" or "Create phone view."

6. View Your New Tile on the Dashboard

Click "Go to dashboard." You will be taken directly to your newly created (or updated) dashboard, where you’ll see the tile you just added. Congratulations, you've successfully added your first tile!

Adding Tiles with Power BI Q&A

Another powerful way to create tiles is by using Power BI's natural language query feature, called Q&A. This allows you to ask questions about your data in plain English and have Power BI generate a visual response, which you can then pin.

1. Open a Dashboard and Find the Q&A Bar

Navigate to any dashboard. At the top, you will see a field that says, "Ask a question about your data." Click there.

2. Ask Your Question

Start typing your query. Power BI will offer suggestions as you type. You can ask things like:

• total sales by product category as pie chart
• average customer satisfaction score over time
• show number of leads by source

3. Pin the Generated Visual

As you type, Power BI will dynamically create a visualization that it thinks best answers your question. Once you are happy with the visual, look for the "Pin visual" icon in the upper-right corner of the Q&A box and click it. The same "Pin to dashboard" workflow will trigger, allowing you to add this custom tile to any dashboard.

How to Add Standalone Tiles (Images, Videos, and More)

Your dashboard isn't limited to just data visuals. You can also add other types of content to provide context, branding, or supplementary information.

On your dashboard, look for the + Add tile command in the top menu bar. Clicking this will open a wizard where you can choose what to add:

• Web content: Paste an embed code (usually an HTML <iframe>) to embed content from other websites, such as a weather widget or a special report.
• Image: Add an image by providing its URL. This is perfect for adding your company logo for branding or a team photo for internal dashboards.
• Text box: Add a title, explanatory paragraph, or important notes directly onto your dashboard to give context to your charts.
• Video: Embed a video directly from YouTube or Vimeo by providing its URL. This is great for tutorial dashboards or company announcements.

Managing and Customizing Your Tiles

Once a tile is on your dashboard, you have full control over it. You can drag and drop it to rearrange its position or drag its corners to resize it and change the dashboard layout.

For more options, hover over a tile and click the three-dot ellipsis (...) for More options. Here you can:

• Edit details: Change the tile’s title, subtitle, or add (or remove) a custom hyperlink. By default, clicking a tile takes you to the report it came from, but a custom link can direct users to another website, a SharePoint document, or any other URL.
• View insights: Let Power BI run a quick analysis on the tile's data to find interesting trends or outliers.
• Set alerts: For tiles that show a single number (like KPIs, gauges, or cards), you can set up data alerts. Power BI will notify you when that metric crosses a certain threshold you define.
• Delete: Remove the tile completely from the dashboard. Don't worry, this doesn't affect the original report at all.

Final Thoughts

Adding tiles is the fundamental skill required to build useful, scannable dashboards in Power BI. By pinning key visuals from your reports, using natural language with Q&A, and adding contextual content like text and images, you can create a centralized command center that communicates business performance clearly and effectively.

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