How to Create Tiles in Power BI Dashboard

Creating your first Power BI dashboard feels like a big step, but it all starts with one simple element: the tile. Understanding how to add, arrange, and customize tiles is the key to transforming a blank slate into a powerful, at-a-glance view of your most important business metrics. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about creating tiles in Power BI, from pinning your first visual to adding dynamic content that brings your dashboard to life.

What are Power BI Tiles? The Building Blocks of Your Dashboard

Think of a Power BI dashboard as the executive summary of your data. While reports are where you do deep, detailed analysis across multiple pages, a dashboard is a single pane that highlights the most critical information from those reports. The individual visual elements on a dashboard are called tiles.

Each tile is essentially a snapshot of a visual from a report. When you click on a tile, it acts as a shortcut, taking you directly to the underlying report page where you can explore the data in more detail. They are the fundamental blocks you use to build your customized data story.

Key things to remember about tiles:

• They are pinned from reports. The most common way to create a tile is by "pinning" a visual you’ve already built in a Power BI report.
• They can be static or live. Most tiles are snapshots, but you can also pin entire live report pages that remain fully interactive.
• They can contain more than visuals. You can also add standalone content like text, images, videos, and embedded web content to provide context.

Getting Started: Pinning a Visual from a Report to a Dashboard

The most straightforward way to add a tile is by pinning an existing visual. This moves a copy of your chart, map, or card from the detailed analytical environment of a report to the high-level overview of a dashboard.

Let's walk through it step-by-step.

Step 1: Open a Report in the Power BI Service First, navigate to the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com) and open a report that contains the visuals you want to feature on your dashboard. For this to work, you must be in viewing or editing mode for a report that has already been published from Power BI Desktop.

Step 2: Find the Pin Icon Hover your mouse over the visual you want to pin. A small menu will appear at the top-right corner of the visual's container. Look for the pushpin icon - this is the "Pin visual" button.

Step 3: Pin Your Visual Click the pin icon. A dialog box will pop up, asking you where you want to pin the visual. You have two options:

• New dashboard: Choose this if you're starting from scratch. You'll be prompted to give your new dashboard a name.
• Existing dashboard: Select this to add the tile to a dashboard you've already created. You’ll see a dropdown list of all your available dashboards.

After making your selection, click the "Pin" button. Power BI will confirm that the visual has been pinned. You'll often see a small pop-up that gives you the option to "Go to dashboard" immediately.

Step 4: View Your New Tile Navigate to your dashboard, and you’ll see your new tile appear. It will likely show up at the bottom of the dashboard, ready for you to move and resize.

More Ways to Create Tiles in Power BI

Pinning individual visuals is just the beginning. Power BI offers several other creative ways to populate your dashboard with meaningful tiles, giving you more flexibility in how you present your data and insights.

Method 1: Pinning an Entire Live Report Page

Sometimes, a single visual isn’t enough. You might want to show a group of related visuals that users can interact with together, complete with filters and slicers. In these cases, you can pin an entire report page as a single, live tile.

A "live tile" is different from a standard pinned visual. It isn't just a static snapshot, it's the actual report page embedded directly into your dashboard. Users can slice, dice, and cross-filter data right from the live tile without ever leaving the dashboard view.

Here's how to do it:

1. Open the report in the Power BI Service and go to the page you want to pin.
2. At the top of the report canvas, click the ellipsis (...) and select "Pin to a dashboard."
3. Choose an existing or new dashboard and click "Pin live."

Your entire report page will now appear as a large tile on your dashboard. You can resize it as needed, and all the functionality of the original report page, including slicers, will remain intact.

Method 2: Creating Tiles with Power BI Q&A

Power BI's Q&A (Questions & Answers) feature lets you ask questions about your data using natural, everyday language. Better yet, you can turn the answers it provides directly into dashboard tiles without ever opening a report.

This is perfect for creating simple visuals on the fly when you have a specific question in mind.

How to use Q&A to create a tile:

1. From your dashboard, click the "Ask a question about your data" box at the top.
2. Start typing your question. For example, you could ask:
3. As you type, Power BI will interpret your question and automatically generate a visual that best represents the answer.
4. Once you're happy with the visual, click the "Pin visual" button in the top-right corner.
5. Select the dashboard where you want to pin it, and you're done! A new tile based on your question will appear on the dashboard.

Method 3: Adding Standalone Content Tiles

Dashboards aren't just for data visuals. You can add other types of media to provide annotations, branding, or helpful context. This is done through the "+ Add a tile" menu on your dashboard.

Images

Adding a company logo or an icon is a great way to brand your dashboard. When you click "+ Add a tile," select "Image" and simply provide a URL to the image you want to display. You can also make the image a hyperlink, directing users to your company website or a relevant resource.

Text Boxes

Use text boxes to add titles, section headings, explanatory notes, or contact information directly onto your dashboard. Just click "+ Add a tile," select "Text box," and you'll be presented with a simple editor to add and style your text.

Web Content

This feature allows you to embed external web content using an iframe. Paste the embed code from another source (like another Power BI report's publish link or a web application) to display it as a live tile. It's a great way to integrate content from other systems into your Power BI overview.

Videos

You can embed videos directly from sources like YouTube or Vimeo. This is useful for including a training video on how to use the dashboard or a presentation from leadership that provides context for the data shown.

Arranging and Customizing Your Dashboard Tiles

Once you've added a few tiles, the next step is organizing them into an intuitive and visually appealing layout. Power BI makes it easy to manage your tiles.

Resizing and Rearranging Tiles

To move a tile, simply click and hold anywhere on it, drag it to a new location on the dashboard canvas, and release. To resize a tile, click and drag the handle in the bottom-right corner. The surrounding tiles will automatically adjust to make room.

Editing Tile Details

Each tile holds more information than what is immediately visible. By editing its details, you can add context and control its behavior.

1. Hover over a tile and click the ellipsis (...) in the top-right corner.
2. Select "Edit details."
3. A "Tile details" pane will appear on the right. Here you can:

Setting Up Data Alerts on Tiles

One of the most powerful features of Power BI dashboards is the ability to set data alerts. This feature sends you an email notification when a metric on a tile crosses a threshold you define. It is only available on tiles that display a single number, such as Cards, KPIs, and Gauges.

To set an alert:

1. Click the ellipsis (...) on a supported tile (like a Card visual).
2. Select "Manage alerts."
3. Click "+ Add alert rule."
4. Define the condition (e.g., Above or Below) and the threshold value.
5. Set how often you want to be notified (e.g., a maximum of once every hour).

These alerts help you stay proactive, as Power BI will tell you when a key business metric needs your attention, saving you from having to check the dashboard manually.

Final Thoughts

Mastering tiles is your first real step toward building powerful, functional, and user-friendly dashboards in Power BI. By combining pinned report visuals, live pages, Q&A results, and supplementary multimedia content, you can create a centralized command center that tells a clear and comprehensive story about your business performance.

If you're looking for a faster way to get from raw data to actionable insights, without the steep learning curve of tools like Power BI, we built a tool to do just that. We created Graphed to let you connect your data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce - and build real-time dashboards just by describing what you want in simple, plain English. Instead of manually pinning tiles, our AI builds the report for you in seconds, freeing you up to focus on the story your data is telling, not the steps needed to tell it.