How to Delete a Dashboard in Power BI

Cleaning up your Power BI workspace to remove old or unused dashboards is a great way to stay organized. This article provides a straightforward guide on how to delete a dashboard in Power BI, explaining what happens to your underlying data and what you should consider before hitting that delete button.

Understanding Power BI Dashboards vs. Reports

Before you delete anything, it’s important to understand the fundamental difference between a dashboard and a report in Power BI, as people often use the terms interchangeably. Getting this right will save you from accidental deletions and future headaches.

Think of it like this:

• A Report is a detailed, multi-page deep dive into a specific dataset. This is where you build individual charts, tables, and graphs, apply filters, and really slice and dice your data. You can interact with it extensively, drilling down into different visualizations. Reports are the workshop where you do the heavy lifting of analysis.
• A Dashboard is a single-page, high-level overview. It's designed to be a summary, displaying the most important metrics from one or more reports. Each visualization on a dashboard is a "tile" that is "pinned" from a report. Clicking on a dashboard tile usually takes you back to the specific report it came from for more detail. Dashboards are the showroom, highlighting the finished product.

The key takeaway is that dashboards and reports are separate objects in Power BI. Deleting a dashboard does not delete the report it came from, nor does it affect the underlying dataset. All of your detailed work in the report remains perfectly safe. You're simply removing the single-page summary you pinned from it.

Before You Delete: A Quick Checklist

Permanently deleting anything can be nerve-wracking. Following this quick checklist will ensure you’re doing it for the right reasons and don’t accidentally disrupt someone else's workflow.

1. Confirm the Dashboard is Truly Obsolete

Is the dashboard old because a campaign ended or a project is complete? Or is it simply out of date? Sometimes, a quick refresh or edit is all a dashboard needs to become relevant again. If a dashboard tracks key business metrics, check if it just needs to be updated with new tiles or connected to a more recent report. If it’s tied to a one-off project from three years ago, however, it's likely safe to delete.

2. Notify Your Team About the Deletion

If the dashboard lives in a shared workspace, it’s not just yours. Someone else on your sales, marketing, or senior leadership team might rely on that dashboard for their morning check-in. Before deleting, send a quick message to your team (via Slack, Teams, or email) to let them know. Announce something like, “Hey team, I'm planning to delete the outdated 'Q2 2021 Marketing Spend' dashboard at the end of the day to clean up the workspace. Please let me know if anyone still uses it.” This is a small step that can prevent major issues and shows consideration for your colleagues.

3. Check for Organizational Apps

Is this dashboard part of a Power BI App that has been published and shared across your organization? An App bundles related dashboards, reports, and datasets into a single package for easy distribution. Deleting a dashboard that is part of a widely used App will affect all the users of that App. You'll need to update the App after deleting the content to ensure users have a smooth experience. Always consider the wider context of how the dashboard is being consumed.

How to Delete a Power BI Dashboard (Step-by-Step)

Once you’ve gone through the checklist and are sure you want to proceed, the actual deletion process is very simple. Here’s exactly how to do it.

Step 1: Navigate to Your Workspace

First, log in to your Power BI service online (app.powerbi.com). On the left-hand navigation pane, click on Workspaces. This will show you a list of all the workspaces you have access to. Select the workspace that contains the dashboard you want to delete. This might be your personal "My workspace" or a collaborative team workspace like "Marketing" or "Sales Team."

Step 2: Locate the Dashboard

Inside the workspace, you’ll see tabs at the top for All, Content, and Datasets + dataflows. By default, you'll land on "All". To make things easier, click on the "Content" tab, then find the Dashboards filter or tab at the very top. This will filter the list to show only the dashboards, hiding all the reports and datasets from view.

Now, scroll through the list to find the specific dashboard you want to remove.

Step 3: Access the 'More options' Menu

Once you've found your dashboard, hover your mouse over its name. A few icons will appear to the right. Look for the vertical ellipsis (the three dots), which represents the More options menu, and click on it.

Step 4: Select 'Delete' and Confirm

A dropdown menu will appear with several actions. Click on Delete. Power BI will then show you a confirmation pop-up window asking, “Are you sure you want to delete this dashboard?” This is your final chance to turn back.

Click the final Delete button to permanently remove the dashboard from your workspace.

That’s it! The dashboard is gone, leaving your workspace a little tidier.

Can You Recover a Deleted Dashboard in Power BI?

This is one of the most common questions, and the answer is usually no. Within the Power BI service itself, there is no Recycle Bin or "undo" button. Once you confirm the deletion, the dashboard is permanently gone.

This reality underscores the importance of the pre-deletion checklist above. It is why you should always double-check with your team before removing anything from a shared workspace.

The only rare exception might involve administrator-level backups or if your workspace is connected to a SharePoint or OneDrive backend where files have their own recycle bin, but this doesn't apply to the native dashboard objects created within the service itself. For the average user, it’s best to assume that deletion is final.

What if 'Delete' Is Grayed Out or Missing?

Ever found yourself ready to delete a dashboard, but the "Delete" button is grayed out or simply not there? This almost always comes down to one thing: permissions.

In a shared Power BI workspace, there are different roles that determine what you can and cannot do:

• Admin: Has full control over the workspace, including deleting it.
• Member: Can edit and add content, manage permissions, and delete dashboards and reports.
• Contributor: Can create, edit, and delete their own content within the workspace.
• Viewer: Can only view and interact with content, they cannot edit or delete anything.

If you can't delete a dashboard, you're likely assigned a Viewer role. Viewers have read-only access, which prevents them from accidentally removing content they rely on. To solve this, you'll need to contact an Admin or a Member of the workspace and ask them to either delete the dashboard for you or upgrade your permissions if appropriate.

A Final Word on Deleting Reports

Since we've clearly distinguished between dashboards and reports, it's helpful to remember that reports can also be deleted. The process is identical: navigate to your workspace, go to the Reports tab, find the report you want to remove, click the ellipsis, and select "Delete".

However, deleting a report has a much larger impact than deleting a dashboard. A report contains all the intricate charts, formulas, and connections that you built. If you delete a report, any dashboard tiles that you pinned from that report will also break or disappear, displaying an error message because their source no longer exists.

Always be extra cautious when deleting reports, as they are often the source for multiple dashboards and are where the detailed analytical work resides.

Final Thoughts

Deleting a dashboard in Power BI is a quick task that can help you maintain a clean and effective analytics environment. The process is straightforward, but remember that the action is final, so it's always wise to pause and run through a mental checklist, especially when collaborating in a shared workspace.

While managing dashboards is part of the process, creating them in the first place is often the most time-consuming step - especially in tools like Power BI that have a steep learning curve. We created Graphed to solve this. Instead of a difficult, manual setup process, we let you connect all your sales and marketing data sources and then simply describe the dashboard you need in plain English. Graphed’s AI builds it for you in seconds, automatically, keeping everything up-to-date in real time. It turns hours of data wrangling into a simple conversation.