How to Create a View in Power BI

Creating different "views" in Power BI is how you transform raw data into a story that your team can actually understand and act on. Whether you want to see sales performance by quarter, track marketing campaign results, or build an interactive dashboard, it all starts with building the right view. This tutorial will walk you through the practical steps to create and customize views in Power BI, from basic report pages to dynamic, user-friendly dashboards.

What Exactly Is a "View" in Power BI?

In Power BI, the term "view" can mean a few different things depending on the context. You might be trying to:

• Build a standard report page filled with charts and graphs.
• Create custom, filtered views for specific users or scenarios (like a "Marketing View" vs. a "Sales View").
• Look at the underlying data model to see how your tables are connected.

Don't worry, we'll cover all of these. Let's start with the most common one: building a simple report view.

Creating Your First Report View: A Step-by-Step Guide

The report view is the front-end canvas where you bring your data to life. It's where you'll drag and drop visuals to build pages that answer business questions. Think of each page in your report as a unique view of your data.

Let's build a simple sales overview. To follow along, you can use any dataset with some sales figures, product categories, and dates.

Step 1: Get Your Data into Power BI

First, you need data. In Power BI Desktop, go to the Home tab and click on Get Data. For this example, we’ll assume you’re connecting to an Excel workbook or a CSV file. Select your file and click Load to bring the tables into your Power BI model.

Step 2: Get Familiar with the Report Canvas

Once your data is loaded, click the Report icon on the left-hand navigation pane. This opens the canvas, which is your main workspace. Take a look around at the three most important panes:

• Fields pane (Right): This lists all the data tables and columns you loaded. This is your raw material.
• Visualizations pane (Center-Right): This is your toolkit, containing all the different chart types you can use (bar chart, line chart, map, etc.).
• Filters pane (Far Right): This is where you can apply filters to a specific visual, an entire page, or all pages in your report.

Step 3: Add and Configure a Visual

Let's create our first visual: a bar chart showing Sales Amount by Product Category.

1. From the Visualizations pane, click the icon for a stacked column chart. A blank placeholder will appear on your canvas.
2. With the placeholder selected, go to the Fields pane. Find your sales amount field (e.g., SalesAmount) and drag it onto the Y-axis well in the Visualizations pane.
3. Next, find your product category field (e.g., ProductCategory) and drag it onto the X-axis well.

Instantly, you should see a bar chart on your canvas — you’ve just created your first data view!

Step 4: Crafting the View with Multiple Visuals

A single chart is a good start, but a comprehensive view usually requires several visuals that work together. Let's add two more:

• Sales Over Time (Line Chart): Click on a blank area of the canvas. Select the Line chart visual. Drag your Date field to the X-axis and SalesAmount to the Y-axis. Power BI will automatically create a date hierarchy, letting you drill down from year to quarter to month.
• Sales by Region (Map): Click on the canvas again. Select the Map visual. Drag a geographical field like Region or State to the Location well and SalesAmount to the Bubble size well.

Now you have three distinct visuals on one page, creating a multi-faceted view of your sales performance. You can resize and drag these visuals around to arrange them in a clean, logical layout.

Making Views Interactive with Slicers

A static dashboard is just a picture. A great dashboard is interactive, allowing users to explore the data for themselves. The easiest way to do this is with Slicers.

A slicer is essentially a visual filter that sits directly on your report canvas. Users can click on it to filter all other visuals on the page.

How to Add a Slicer:

1. Click a blank space on your canvas.
2. In the Visualizations pane, select the Slicer icon (it looks like a funnel).
3. From the Fields pane, drag the field you want to filter by into the slicer. A Year field from your date table is a perfect candidate.

You’ll now see a list of years on your report. When you click on a specific year, like "2023," your sales by category chart, map, and line chart will all instantly update to show data for only that year. You’ve just empowered your users to create their own filtered views on the fly.

Creating Curated Views with Bookmarks

What if you want to guide your audience through a specific story or create pre-defined views for different teams? For instance, maybe you want one button for a "Q1 2024 Performance" view and another for the "Full Year 2023" view. This is where Bookmarks become incredibly useful.

A bookmark captures the exact state of a report page — including all filters, slicers, and even the visibility of certain visuals. You can then link to these bookmarks with buttons to create a custom navigation experience.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Bookmarked Views:

1. Set Up Your First View State

Adjust your report page to look exactly how you want your first view to appear. For example, use your slicer to filter the page to show only "Q1 2024" data.

2. Create the Bookmark

• Go to the View tab in the Power BI ribbon.
• Check the box for Bookmarks to open the Bookmarks pane.
• With your page filtered for Q1, click Add in the Bookmarks pane.
• Double-click the new bookmark to rename it to something descriptive, like "Q1 2024 View".

3. Create Your Second View

Now, adjust the page for your next state. For example, change the slicer to show data for the full year "2023." Go back to the Bookmarks pane, click Add again, and rename this one "2023 Full Year View".

4. (Optional but Recommended) Add Buttons for Navigation

To make it easy for users to toggle between these views:

• Go to the Insert tab and select Buttons > Blank.
• Place the button on your canvas. With the button selected, go to the Format pane.
• Turn on the Action toggle. For Type, select Bookmark. For Bookmark, choose your "Q1 2024 View".
• Under Shape > Text, you can add a label like "Show Q1 2024" to the button.
• Repeat this process to create a second button linked to your "2023 Full Year View" bookmark.

Now, users can simply click these buttons to instantly switch between the two curated data views you designed. This is a powerful way to control the narrative and simplify analysis for your audience.

A Quick Look at the Data Model View

Finally, there's another "view" in Power BI that works behind the scenes: the Model View. You can access it by clicking the icon on the far left that looks like three connected boxes.

This view doesn't contain any charts. Instead, it shows a diagram of all your data tables and the relationships (the lines connecting them) between them. This view is the blueprint for your report.

You don't build charts here, but ensuring the relationships are correct is fundamental. If your Sales table isn't properly connected to your Date table, then filtering by year won't work correctly. While creating relationships is a deeper topic, just know that this view is where you go to diagnose why your visuals might be behaving unexpectedly.

Final Thoughts

You now have the skills to create several types of views in Power BI, from a basic report canvas filled with visuals to an interactive dashboard using slicers and a guided experience built with bookmarks. The key is to start with a clear question you want to answer and then build the view purposefully to provide that answer clearly and effectively.

Of course, building dashboards in tools like Power BI can be time-consuming, with a significant learning curve to master all the features. We created Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn't require weeks of training. You can connect your marketing and sales data sources in seconds, then simply describe the dashboard you want in plain English - like "create a report comparing Facebook Ads spend vs Shopify revenue by campaign for last month" - and Graphed builds it for you instantly, keeping it updated in real-time.