How to Pin to Dashboard in Power BI

Creating a beautiful, data-rich report is a great start, but the real power of Power BI comes from summarizing your most critical metrics into a single, cohesive view. That’s where dashboards come in, and pinning is the simple action that brings them to life. This article will walk you through exactly how to pin visuals in Power BI, explaining the difference between reports and dashboards and providing step-by-step instructions to build your first summary view.

What Does "Pinning" Mean in Power BI?

In Power BI, "pinning" is the action of taking a specific visual - like a chart, graph, map, or card - from a report and adding it as a tile to a dashboard. Think of your Power BI report as a detailed, multi-page book filled with deep analysis. Pinning is like photocopying the most important chart from that book and tacking it to a corkboard on your wall.

This corkboard is your dashboard. Its purpose isn't for deep analysis, but for quick, at-a-glance monitoring of your most important key performance indicators (KPIs). When an executive wants to know the daily sales numbers, they don’t need to sift through a 10-page report, they just need to glance at the dashboard. Pinning is the fundamental skill that allows you to build this high-level summary, making your data accessible and digestible for everyone in your organization.

Understanding the Difference: Reports vs. Dashboards

Before you start pinning, it’s vital to understand the distinction between reports and dashboards. Newcomers to Power BI often use the terms interchangeably, but they serve very different purposes. Recognizing this difference is the key to using the tool effectively.

Power BI Reports: The Deep Dive

A Power BI report is where you do your detailed exploration and analysis. It's the canvas where you connect to data, build visuals, and look for insights.

• Multi-Page Canvas: Reports can have many pages or tabs, each potentially focusing on a different aspect of your data (e.g., one page for sales, one for marketing, one for operations).
• Highly Interactive: Reports are designed for deep dives. You can use slicers, filters, and cross-highlighting to drill down into the data, change date ranges, and answer specific, detailed questions.
• Sourced from a Single Dataset: A single report is connected to one underlying dataset. All the visuals within that report pull from the same pool of information.
• Authoring Environment: You build and design your reports in Power BI Desktop before publishing them to the Power BI Service.

Power BI Dashboards: The "At-a-Glance" Summary

A dashboard is a single-page interface created in the Power BI Service. Its primary goal is to provide a consolidated, summarized view of your most important metrics.

• Single-Page View: Dashboards are always a single pane of glass. There are no pages or tabs, forcing you to focus only on what is most critical.
• Monitoring, Not Exploring: Dashboards are less interactive than reports. You can't use slicers or filters directly on a dashboard. Instead, clicking a tile takes you directly to the underlying report where you can explore further.
• Sourced from Multiple Reports (and Datasets): This is a dashboard's secret power. You can pin visuals from many different reports, which can be connected to many different datasets, all onto one dashboard. You could have one tile showing website traffic from Google Analytics and another showing sales revenue from your CRM, right next to each other.
• A Feature of Power BI Service: Dashboards can only be created and viewed in the online Power BI Service, not in Power BI Desktop.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Pin an Individual Visual

Now that you understand the "why," let's get into the "how." The process of pinning a visual from a report to a dashboard is straightforward once you know where to look. Remember, this entire process takes place in the Power BI Service (the web-based version), not in Power BI Desktop.

1. Open Your Power BI Report

First, log in to your Power BI account at app.powerbi.com. Navigate to the Workspace that contains the report you want to work with. Find your report in the content list and click on it to open it.

2. Hover Over the Visual You Want to Pin

Once your report is open, find the specific chart or visual element that you want to add to your dashboard. This could be a line chart showing revenue over time, a KPI card displaying total users, or a pie chart breaking down marketing channels. As you move your mouse cursor over the visual, a small set of icons will appear in its top-right corner.

3. Click the "Pin Visual" Icon

Look for the icon that looks like a thumbtack. This is the "Pin visual" button. Click it. A dialog box will pop up, asking you where you want to pin this visual.

4. Choose Your Dashboard

In the "Pin to dashboard" window, you'll have two options:

• New dashboard: If you don't have a dashboard yet or want to create a new one for this purpose, select this option. You'll be prompted to give your new dashboard a name. For example, "Executive Sales Summary" or "Marketing Campaign Performance."
• Existing dashboard: If you already have a dashboard where you want to add this visual, select this option. A dropdown list will appear, showing all the dashboards you have access to. Simply select the one you want.

5. Click "Pin"

After you've named your new dashboard or selected an existing one, click the "Pin" button at the bottom of the dialog box. Voila! Power BI has now created a "tile" of that visual on your selected dashboard.

A small notification will appear in the top-right corner of your screen confirming that the visual was pinned. This notification includes a convenient "Go to dashboard" button, which you can click to see your pinned tile in its new home immediately.

How to Pin an Entire Report Page as a Live Tile

Sometimes, a single visual isn't enough. You might have a report page with several interconnected visuals and slicers that you want to display together on the dashboard. For this, Power BI offers a powerful feature called "Pin a live page."

When you pin a live page, you are not just taking a static screenshot. The entire report page becomes a single, interactive tile on your dashboard. You can interact with slicers and cross-highlight charts right from the dashboard, without having to click through to the report. This is an excellent way to provide dashboard viewers with limited filtering capabilities.

Here's how to do it:

1. Navigate to the Report and Page

In the Power BI Service, open the report containing the page you want to pin.

2. Open the "More Options" Menu

At the top of the report's menu bar (above your visuals), click the three dots (...) to reveal more options.

3. Select "Pin a live page"

From the dropdown menu, click on the "Pin a live page" option. A dialog box similar to the one for pinning individual visuals will appear.

4. Choose the Destination Dashboard

Again, you can either pin the page to an "Existing dashboard" or create a "New dashboard." Make your choice.

5. Click "Pin live"

Once you've selected your destination, click the "Pin live" button. The entire report page will now appear as a single, large tile on your dashboard, and it will automatically update as the underlying data refreshes.

Tips for Managing Your Pinned Dashboard Tiles

Once you've pinned a few tiles, you'll want to organize them to create a clean and intuitive layout. The Power BI dashboard interface makes this easy.

Resizing and Rearranging Tiles

You have full control over the placement and size of your tiles.

• To move a tile: Simply click anywhere on the tile and drag it to a new position on the dashboard canvas.
• To resize a tile: Hover over the bottom-right corner of a tile until your cursor changes to a diagonal arrow. Then, click and drag to make the tile larger or smaller.

Editing Tile Details

By default, a tile inherits its title from the visual in the report. But you can customize this and add more context. Hover over any tile and click the three dots (...) that appear in the top-right corner. This will open a menu where you can click "Edit details." From here, you can change the tile's Title, add a Subtitle for more context, and even set a custom link so that clicking the tile takes users to a different report or a specific URL.

Why Can't I Pin a Visual? Common Issues

If you don't see the thumbtack icon, one of three things is likely happening:

1. You're in Power BI Desktop: Pinning is an action that connects a report element to a dashboard. Since dashboards only exist in the Power BI Service, the pinning feature is not available in the offline Desktop application. You must publish your report first.
2. You don't have the right permissions: To pin from a report, you need at least "Read" access to it. If a report has been shared with you with fewer permissions, or you're a viewer in an app, you may not be able to pin from it.
3. The visual is from a specific app: Some visuals from third-party or custom analytics packages may have pinning functionality disabled by organization's administrators. This is less common but can be a factor in some corporate environments.

Final Thoughts

Mastering the pin feature is the bridge between building detailed reports and delivering high-level executive summaries. You've now learned the crucial difference between reports and dashboards and can confidently use Power BI Service to pin both individual visuals and entire interactive 'live' pages to create consolidated, at-a-glance views of your most important data.

While mastering tools like Power BI is a great skill, the process of building reports, publishing them, and arranging dashboards can still be time-consuming, especially when your data sits in different platforms. We built Graphed to simplify this entire workflow. Instead of configuring data models and pinning visuals one by one, you just use simple, natural language to describe the dashboard you want to see. We connect to your data and instantly build auto-updating dashboards for you - turning hours of setup into a 30-second task.