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How to Create a Simple Dashboard in Power BI

Cody Schneider•

Creating a Power BI dashboard is one of the most effective ways to get a high-level, real-time snapshot of your most important business metrics. Instead of getting lost in spreadsheets, you can build a clean, visual command center that helps you - and your team - make faster, more informed decisions. This guide will walk you through building a simple yet functional dashboard from scratch, even if you’re brand new to Power BI.

Power BI Report vs. Dashboard: What’s the Difference?

Before we start building, it's important to understand a key concept in the Power BI ecosystem: the difference between a report and a dashboard. People often use these terms interchangeably, but they serve distinct purposes.

  • A Power BI Report: This is a multi-page, interactive deep dive into a dataset. It's built in the Power BI Desktop application and is designed for exploration and analysis. You can slice, dice, filter, and drill down into the data across different pages to uncover specific insights. Think of it as the detailed story behind your data.

  • A Power BI Dashboard: This is a single-page canvas created in the web-based Power BI Service. It acts as a high-level summary or headline view of your key metrics (KPIs). Each visualization on a dashboard is a "tile" that you "pin" from a report. Dashboards are meant for monitoring performance at a glance and lack the deep-dive filtering capabilities of a full report. Clicking on a tile, however, takes you directly to the underlying report for further analysis.

In short: you build a detailed, multi-page report in Power BI Desktop, and then you pin the most important visuals from that report to create a single-page summary dashboard in Power BI Service.

Getting Started: What You’ll Need

To follow along with this tutorial, you'll need two things (both are free to start):

  1. Power BI Desktop: This is a free Windows application you download from Microsoft. It’s where you will connect to your data and build your report visuals.

  2. Power BI Service Account: This is the cloud-based portion of Power BI where you publish, share, and create dashboards. You can sign up for a free account with your work or school email address.

You’ll also need some data. For this example, we’ll use a simple sales dataset in an Excel spreadsheet. You can create one easily with columns like:

  • OrderDate (e.g., 1/15/2023)

  • Region (e.g., North, South, East, West)

  • Category (e.g., Electronics, Furniture, Office Supplies)

  • Product (e.g., Laptop, Desk Chair, A4 Paper)

  • UnitPrice (e.g., 1200)

  • Quantity (e.g., 2)

  • TotalSales (calculated as UnitPrice * Quantity)

Make sure you have at least 50-100 rows to make the visualizations interesting.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your First Power BI Dashboard

Ready? Let's build a simple, four-step process: import data, create a report, publish the report, and finally, build the dashboard from that report.

Step 1: Import and Prepare Your Data in Power BI Desktop

First, we need to bring our data into Power BI, a process often referred to as "getting data."

  1. Open Power BI Desktop. You’ll be greeted with a welcome screen. Close it to reveal the main canvas.

  2. On the Home ribbon at the top of the window, click on Get Data. This opens up a list of all the data sources Power BI can connect to.

  3. Since our data is in Excel, select Excel Workbook and click Connect. Navigate to where you saved your sales data file and select it.

  4. The Navigator window will pop up, showing you the sheets and tables available in your spreadsheet. Check the box next to your data sheet (e.g., 'Sheet1') to see a preview.

  5. At the bottom, you have two options: Load and Transform Data.

    • Load: This loads the data directly into your Power BI report as-is.

    • Transform Data: This opens the Power Query Editor, a powerful tool for cleaning and shaping your data before you load it.

Click Transform Data to take a quick look. Here, you can perform simple cleaning operations like renaming columns, changing data types (e.g., making sure 'OrderDate' is a Date type and 'TotalSales' is a Decimal Number), or removing errors. Once everything looks good, click Close & Apply in the top-left corner.

Your data is now loaded! You'll see the column names (called "fields") listed in the Fields pane on the right side of the screen.

Step 2: Build Your Visualizations in a Report

Now comes the fun part: turning that raw data into insightful charts and graphs. Remember, we’re building a report first.

The Power BI Desktop interface has three main areas: the Fields pane (your data), the Visualizations pane (your chart types), and a white page where you’ll drag and drop everything.

Visual 1: A Card for Total Sales

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like total revenue should be front and center. A "Card" visual is perfect for this.

  1. Click on an empty part of the report canvas to make sure you don't have anything selected.

  2. In the Fields pane, find your 'TotalSales' field and drag it onto the canvas. Power BI will default to showing it either as a column chart or a table.

  3. With that new visual selected, go to the Visualizations pane and click the Card icon (it looks like a rectangle with "123" in it). It will instantly transform into a large, clear number showing the sum of all your sales. You can resize and move it anywhere you'd like.

Visual 2: A Bar Chart for Sales by Category

Let’s see which product categories are bringing in the most revenue.

  1. Click another empty spot on the canvas.

  2. From the Fields pane, drag 'Category' onto the canvas. Then, drag 'TotalSales' onto the same spot.

  3. Power BI will generate a chart. With it selected, click the Stacked bar chart icon in the Visualizations pane. This gives you a clean comparison of sales performance across different categories.

Visual 3: A Line Chart for Sales Over Time

Next, let's track our sales performance over your specified date range. A line chart is ideal for showing trends.

  1. Find an empty space on the canvas.

  2. Drag OrderDate into the canvas. Power BI is smart enough to understand dates and will automatically create a hierarchy (Year, Quarter, Month, Day).

  3. Now, drag TotalSales into the same visual.

  4. In the Visualizations pane, select the Line chart icon. You now have a chart showing how sales have trended over time. In the visual's axis settings, you can drill up or down to view the data by month, quarter, or year.

Visual 4: A Map to Show Sales by Region

If your data includes locations, a map is a great way to visualize geographic performance.

  1. Drag your Region field onto an empty part of the canvas.

  2. From the Visualizations pane, click the Map icon (a small globe). Power BI will plot your regions on a map.

  3. To give the map context, drag the TotalSales field onto the Bubble size area within the visualization's options. Now, the circles on the map will be sized based on the total sales for each region, giving you an immediate visual cue for your top-performing areas.

With these four visuals complete, save your report by going to File > Save. Give it a descriptive name like "Sales Report - Q1 2024".

Step 3: Publish Your Report to Power BI Service

Our report looks great on our desktop, but to create a dashboard, we need to get it to the cloud-based Power BI Service.

  1. In Power BI Desktop, go to the Home tab on the ribbon.

  2. Click on the Publish button. If you're not already signed in, you'll be prompted to do so with your Power BI Service account.

  3. You’ll then be asked to choose a destination workspace. Every user has a default space called My Workspace. Select it and click Publish.

Power BI will upload your report and dataset. Once it's done, you'll get a success message with a link to open the report in Power BI service.

Step 4: Create the Dashboard and Pin Your Visuals

This is the final step where everything comes together. Here in Power BI Service, we'll pluck the most essential visuals from our report to create a summary dashboard.

  1. After publishing, sign in to your Power BI Service account at app.powerbi.com.

  2. In the navigation pane on the left, find and navigate to the workspace where you published your report (e.g., "My Workspace"). You'll see two new items: your report and the corresponding dataset.

  3. Click on the report. It should look exactly as it did in Power BI Desktop.

  4. Now to "pin" visuals. Hover your mouse over the Total Sales card you created. A few icons will appear. Click the pin icon.

  5. A dialog box will pop up asking you where to pin the visual. Select New dashboard, give it a name like "Executive Sales Overview," and click Pin.

  6. Now, do the same for your other three visuals. For each one, hover, click the pin icon, but this time select Existing dashboard and choose the "Executive Sales Overview" you just created.

With all your visuals pinned, find your new dashboard in the navigation pane under the Dashboards section. Click on it. Voilà!

Step 5: Arrange and Customize Your Dashboard

The automatic layout probably needs a few tweaks. You can easily resize and move the tiles by simply clicking and dragging them until you have a layout that's clear and visually appealing.

From here, you can add dashboard themes (light or dark), add a title, or even embed external content like videos or web pages to provide more context.

Final Thoughts

Creating your first Power BI dashboard brings your most important metrics to life. You just learned how to move from a raw spreadsheet to a report in Power BI Desktop, publish it, and construct a concise, shareable dashboard in Power BI Service. It’s a foundational skill for anyone looking to build a more data-driven culture.

But as you can see, the process still involves several distinct steps and a learning curve for a new tool. If your goal is to quickly build dashboards by connecting to common platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, or HubSpot without a lot of manual configuration, you might find traditional BI tools a bit rigid. At Graphed, we simplify this process by having AI do the heavy lifting. Instead of building visuals one by one, you just connect your data sources in a few clicks and ask for what you want in plain English. You can say things like "create a dashboard showing a funnel from Facebook Ads clicks to Shopify purchases for last month," and have a fully interactive, live-data dashboard built in seconds. If you're looking for a faster way to insights, feel free to try Graphed for yourself.