How to Prepare a Dashboard in Power BI

Creating a Power BI dashboard lets you see the most important metrics for your business on a single screen, helping you monitor performance and make decisions in real-time. This guide will walk you through the entire process step by step, from connecting your data to arranging your final dashboard for a perfect at-a-glance view.

First, What Is a Power BI Dashboard? And How Is It Different from a Report?

Before we build anything, it's important to understand a key distinction in Power BI: a report is not the same as a dashboard. People often use the terms interchangeably, but they serve different purposes.

• A Power BI Report is a multi-page canvas where you can perform deep-dive analysis. You can add slicers, filters, and dozens of detailed charts. Think of it as a comprehensive, interactive document where you explore your data.
• A Power BI Dashboard is a single-page summary. It’s an at-a-glance view of your most critical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The visuals on a dashboard (called "tiles") are pinned from one or more reports. Think of it as the cover page or executive summary that highlights the most critical findings.

In short, you build a detailed report first, and then you select the most important visuals from that report to create your summary dashboard. Our goal today is to build that final dashboard, which means we'll need to create a simple report along the way.

Getting Started: Prepare Your Data

The quality of your dashboard depends entirely on the quality of your data. Before you even open Power BI, take a moment to look at your data source, whether it's an Excel spreadsheet, a CSV file, or a database connection. This simple step can save you hours of frustration later.

Key Data Preparation Tips:

• Organize Data in Tables: Make sure your data is in a proper tabular format, where each column has a clear header and each row represents a single record. Avoid merged cells or cosmetic formatting in your source files.
• Check Data Types: Ensure dates are formatted as dates, numbers are formatted as numbers (not text), and text fields are consistent.
• Clean Your Data: Look for and correct any inconsistencies, spelling errors (e.g., “USA,” “U.S.A.,” and “United States” should all be standardized), or blank rows that could throw off your analysis.

While you can do a lot of data cleanup inside Power BI using its Power Query Editor, a little housekeeping in your original files makes the whole process much smoother.

Step 1: Build a Report in Power BI Desktop

Our dashboard starts its life as a report created in the Power BI Desktop application. This is where we'll connect our data, create our charts, and design the visuals we want to highlight.

Connect to a Data Source

First, we need to load our data into Power BI.

1. Open Power BI Desktop. In the Home ribbon, click on Get Data.
2. You'll see a list of common sources. For this example, let's select Excel workbook. Choose your prepared Excel file.
3. A "Navigator" window will pop up, showing you all the tables and sheets within your file. Select the table you want to use and click Load. If your data is messy, you can click Transform Data to open the Power Query Editor for advanced cleaning.

Transform and Model Your Data

Once your data is loaded, you have the chance to shape it. On the left side of Power BI Desktop, you’ll see three icons:

• Report View: The canvas where you build visuals.
• Data View: Shows your data in a table format, like a spreadsheet.
• Model View: Shows how your different data tables are related to each other. If you load multiple tables (e.g., a sales table and a product details table), this is where you can create relationships between them using a common column like 'ProductID'. This is essential for building dashboards that can be filtered cohesively.

Spend a minute in the Data View to confirm your columns have the correct data types. For example, click on your "Revenue" column and make sure the Data Type in the top ribbon is set to a number format, like Currency, and your "Date" column is set to Date.

Create Your Visualizations

This is where your report comes to life. In the Report View, you’ll see your canvas and three key panes on the right:

• Fields: A list of all the tables and data columns you loaded.
• Visualizations: A palette of charts, graphs, and tables you can create.
• Filters: Where you can apply filters to your entire page or specific visuals.

Let’s create a few common visuals. For each one, you’ll either drag a field onto the blank canvas first or choose a chart type from the Visualizations pane and then add your data.

Example 1: A Card for Total Sales

1. Click on the Card visual in the Visualizations pane.
2. From the Fields pane, drag your "Sales" or "Revenue" field into the ‘Fields’ box for the visual.
3. That’s it! You’ll now have a simple card showing your total sales number.

Example 2: A Bar Chart for Sales by Category

1. Click a blank spot on the canvas, then select the Stacked bar chart icon.
2. Drag your "Product Category" field to the ‘Y-axis’ box.
3. Drag your "Sales" field to the ‘X-axis’ box.
4. You now have a horizontal bar chart showing sales performance for each category.

Example 3: A Line Chart for Sales Over Time

1. Click another blank spot, then select the Line chart icon.
2. Drag your "Date" field to the ‘X-axis’ box.
3. Drag your "Sales" field to the ‘Y-axis’ box.

Arrange these visuals on your report page so they are clear and easy to read. Once you have a few essential visuals ready, it's time to create the dashboard.

Step 2: Create Your Dashboard in Power BI Service

Dashboards don't live in Power BI Desktop, they live in the cloud-based Power BI Service. This means you need to publish your report first.

Publish Your Report

After saving your report file (.pbix), go to the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop and click Publish.

• You will be prompted to sign into your Power BI account.
• Next, you'll be asked to choose a destination workspace. My workspace is your personal area. Select it and click Publish.

Once it's finished, you'll get a success notification with a link to open and view your report in the Power BI Service.

Pin Your Visuals to a Dashboard

Now comes the fun part! With your report open in your web browser (in the Power BI Service), you're ready to create the actual dashboard.

1. Hover over any visual you want to add to your dashboard, like the Total Sales card. A few icons will appear in the corner.
2. Click the Pin visual icon (it looks like a thumbtack).
3. A pop-up window will appear. Since this is your first time, select New dashboard, give it a name like "Executive Sales Dashboard," and click Pin.
4. Repeat this for your other visuals. When you pin your second visual (e.g., the bar chart), choose Existing dashboard and select the dashboard you just created.

Arrange and Customize Your Dashboard

Once you’ve pinned all your desired visuals, navigate to your new dashboard from the left-hand navigation pane in Power BI Service.

Here you’ll see all your pinned visuals as "tiles." Now you can organize your layout:

• Move Tiles: Click and drag any tile to move it around the canvas.
• Resize Tiles: Click and drag the corner of any tile to make it larger or smaller.
• Edit Tile Details: Click the three dots (...) in the corner of a tile to edit its title, add a subtitle, or link it to a custom URL.
• Add More Content: From the top menu, you can also click + Add tile to add other elements like text boxes (to provide context), images (like a company logo), or streaming data.

Arrange the tiles so that your most important KPI (like Total Sales) is in the top-left, as that's where people tend to look first. The goal is to create a logical, easy-to-read flow of information that tells a clear story in seconds.

Final Thoughts

Building a powerful dashboard in Power BI boils down to a clear process: prepare clean data, build a detailed report with visuals in Power BI Desktop, publish it to the Power BI Service, and pin the most essential visuals onto a single-page dashboard. By focusing on your core metrics, you create a powerful command center for monitoring business health.

While Power BI is a fantastic tool for deep analysis, it comes with a considerable learning curve just to build a simple view. For marketers and business owners who need immediate insights from their data without becoming a data expert, we created Graphed. Our platform connects directly to data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce and uses AI to build dashboards for you. Simply describe what you want to see in plain English, and Graphed generates real-time dashboards and reports in seconds - letting you get back to making decisions instead of wrangling data.