2.

Drill down into a more granular view of the report data by clicking on
data points within a report.

FIGURE 4-11:
Drill down from
the Power BI
dashboard for a
report.

Working with dashboards

One reason to use Power BI Services is the dashboard feature. It’s all well and
good to be able to work with data on the desktop on a case-by-case basis, but
suppose that you want to aggregate your visualizations on a single page using a
canvas. In that case, the Dashboard feature is the tool to use. A dashboard lets you
tell a story from a series of visualizations — think of a dashboard as a single-page
menu at the restaurant. A dashboard must be well designed, because it contains
the critical highlights so that a reader can drill down into related reports and view
details later.

Dashboards are available only with Power BI Services. You can create dashboards
with a Power BI Free license, but this feature isn’t integrated into Power BI Desk-
top. Therefore, once you build your reports in Power BI Desktop, you need to pub-
lish outputs to Power BI Services. Keep in mind as well that, although dashboards
can be created only on a desktop-based computer, you can view and share dash-
boards on all device form-factors, including Power BI Mobile. When you want to
create a dashboard, you need to have at least one or more reports pinned to a blank
canvas. Each tile (see Figure  4-12) represents a single report based on a single
dataset.

60 PART 1 Put Your BI Thinking Caps On