How to Build Power BI Dashboards

Mynda Treacy

November 3, 2020

Demand for data visualisation skills is showing no signs of slowing. There are many BI tools available, and this can make knowing which one to learn overwhelming.

Global research and advisory firm, Gartner, has recognised Power BI as the Magic Quadrant Leader in analytics and business intelligence platforms for 13 consecutive years.

This is just one of many reasons you should learn how to build Power BI dashboards and reports like the ones below:

Tip: click the bars/columns/lines/labels in the charts to interact with the report and trigger cross filtering and highlighting.

Tip: use the < and > in the navigation bar at the bottom of the report to switch between report pages.



Mac Users: the Power BI Desktop app used to build the reports and dashboards is not available for Mac. However, you can view completed Power BI reports and dashboards using the online Power BI Service or mobile app, and depending on your dataset, in some cases you can author reports in the Power BI service.

How to Build Power BI Dashboards Video

In the video below I teach you step by step how to build the reports you see above. Starting with the process of getting data, modelling it, and then visualising it with Power BI Desktop, before publishing your reports to the Power BI service for secure sharing with your audience.

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More Power BI Resources

Learn Power BI, Power Query and Power Pivot with Mynda. Get up to speed fast with these focussed courses that’ll have you impressing your boss and co-workers with amazing interactive Power BI reports that refresh without you lifting a finger. Get all 3 courses in a discounted bundle from the Power BI course page.

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Don't have a work or school address? Use this workaround to get Power BI without a valid email address.

27 thoughts on “How to Build Power BI Dashboards”

  1. This is a great article on the challenges of Power bi . I especially liked the point about how a centralized data repository can improve visibility and security. In my experience, it can also be very helpful to automate the data collection process as much as possible. This can help to save time and reduce errors. Overall, I would highly recommend this article to anyone who is looking for ways to improve their Visualizing on power bi.

    Reply
  2. Thanks for this tutorial. Mind blowing stuff. Between PBI premium and pro, which one is more ideal for organizations? I would like to share reports with executive management and they should be able to interact with the visuals.

    Reply
  3. Just want to say Thank You for the youtube video showing how to create a PBI dashboard and put it up on the web. Following through on an actual case study is far more effective than reading a book. It’s good to see how one can interact with a PBI dashboard from a blog like this one. And your example .pbix file was built in 2020, making it usable to my version of PBI Desktop which is the limit of what I could install because of Windows 7. All in all, thanks for a job well done!

    Reply
  4. hi, I am trying to get data from mpp file into Power BI to create dashboard. I dont have project web app and there is no functionality I could find in sharepoint to design one. Can you please guide what’s the way around? I tried with export of project online to excel and bring excel data into Power BI but then the data doesnt get transformed into useful dataset. Can you please guide?

    Reply
  5. I cannot get the line chart to work for month or year. It will only form a line if I only select “day,” because the Forecast and Budget files only contain information from January 2020.

    Reply
    • Hi Heather,

      Great to see you’re having a go at building the dashboard. Please read the file called ‘READ_ME_FIRST.txt’ as this explains the issue you’re having and how to fix it so you’re not just seeing January data.

      Mynda

      Reply
  6. Madhavi says
    Here I have a question..
    In power bi of financial report there some problem occurs me. That is in the report of header part the visualization part has been occupied by format text box and subtitles are same only the heading name changed.How can i replace it?

    Reply
  7. The data Provided has “dd/mm/yyyy” format which was giving me errors throught the excercise. I had to reformat so it coincides with the format in my PC… You might want to mention this

    Reply
  8. Hi, Simply amazing content! I’m new to Power Bi is there a way to make Power Bi look and feel like a website. I want to provide the end user something there already familiar with. Thanks for your help.

    Pat

    Reply

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