Dashboards vs Reports

Quick reference

• 00:04 So we've published our report to the cloud.
• 00:07 Now what?
• 00:08 Before we move forward,
• 00:09 we should really talk about the difference between reports and dashboards.
• 00:14 This is particularly key to those of you who've come from a world of Excel where we
• 00:18 basically take our worksheets and
• 00:20 build what we call dashboards in that particular case.
• 00:23 Power BI doesn't see this the same way.
• 00:25 They see those kind of pieces of information as reports, not as dashboards.
• 00:30 Dashboards are a completely different animal as far as Power BI is concerned.
• 00:34 And this is something that we really struggle often as Excel users coming to
• 00:37 Power BI is getting over that particular hurdle.
• 00:40 So let's look again at the flow of how we do this.
• 00:43 We start with data.
• 00:44 Now this could be local data sources and
• 00:47 local databases, it could be hosted databases that are out there on the cloud.
• 00:51 It could be text files, like we started with, it could be Excel files,
• 00:54 it could be anything.
• 00:55 Let's just say there's multiple data sources in this case.
• 00:58 So we go and we take Power BI desktop and we might pull multiple things
• 01:03 from one data source or multiple data sources together to build reports.
• 01:09 The key piece here is that every report that is ever
• 01:12 authored is always done in Power BI Desktop.
• 01:15 Because it's the richest tool set for actually making this work.
• 01:17 Now you can actually build some reports in the cloud but quite frankly,
• 01:20 the tools are not as robust so we're not even gonna cover that at all.
• 01:23 Always go back to the Power BI Desktop to build your reports.
• 01:27 Once we've built our reports, then we publish those into the cloud.
• 01:32 Once they're in the cloud, the report lives in the cloud but we can also go and
• 01:36 create a dashboard in the cloud service as well.
• 01:40 We do this by pinning visuals.
• 01:42 And you'll notice that at the top part here the first dashboard
• 01:45 pulls from a specific report.
• 01:47 Now there could be five or
• 01:48 six visuals that we want from that report, we pin to a specific dashboard,
• 01:52 it doesn't have to take all the visuals it just take some key ones.
• 01:56 The next one down though you'll notice actually pulls from
• 01:58 two separate reports which are coming from two separate databases.
• 02:03 Now if you think back to the comment that I made in the Power BI work flow
• 02:07 I actually told you I said don't try and build things too complicated.
• 02:10 Where you're trying to solve everything under the world in a one particular file.
• 02:14 The reason being is it makes a file very very awkward to work with for a very,
• 02:17 very big very clunky and very complicated.
• 02:19 But in this case with a dashboard we can actually take
• 02:23 different visuals from different reports and bring them together onto
• 02:26 one dashboard to collect all that information in key places.
• 02:29 This gives you the ability to stage things in a smaller fashion and
• 02:33 still put them together at the end.
• 02:35 The other key component about dashboards is that dashboards are the mechanism for
• 02:40 sharing with other users.
• 02:42 We don't share reports, we share dashboards.
• 02:45 So this is a big, big key distinction.
• 02:48 Now the dashboard sharing with other users is obviously also the point where we kick
• 02:52 over from free to a pro license, so that's something else we wanna be aware of.
• 02:56 But in this particular case, this is the big difference between reports and
• 03:00 dashboards is dashboards aggregate information from multiple different
• 03:03 reports.
• 03:04 And can be shared with other users.
• 03:07 So how do you create a dashboard then?
• 03:09 Well, that's a great question.
• 03:12 The way we do it is we actually go into the cloud service because all dashboards
• 03:16 are created in the cloud.
• 03:19 And we pin a visual from a report onto a dashboard.
• 03:24 Now where can we actually pin visuals from?
• 03:28 It turns out, lots of places.
• 03:30 We can go into a report.
• 03:31 We can pin individual items.
• 03:34 We can also pin an entire report as what's called a live page.
• 03:40 Now, this has a specific property that's interesting because
• 03:42 normally when you pin a visual, it doesn't cross filter.
• 03:46 But if you pin the entire report, it still allows cross filtering, so
• 03:49 that's kind of an interesting one.
• 03:52 We can pin directly from Excel,
• 03:53 if you have an add in installed in Excel to do that.
• 03:57 We can pin from something called quick insights, which I will show you shortly.
• 04:02 We can pin from other dashboards as well.
• 04:04 So if somebody shares a dashboard with us, we can potentially pin a tile from there.
• 04:09 We have the ability to go to your dashboard and click an add tile button.
• 04:12 This allows a pin things like images or text boxes, video or
• 04:16 web content into a dashboard as well.
• 04:18 And we can also pin from another little animal which is obviously fantastic
• 04:23 called Q&A.
• 04:24 And I'm gonna show you some of the different components around those
• 04:28 in the next modules.
• 04:31 So let's create a dashboard.
• 04:32 You'll notice that I am in the Power BI web service in my web browser.
• 04:36 I'm not in Power BI Desktop, and I'm looking at my report.
• 04:39 In order to create a dashboard,
• 04:41 I can mouse over the visual that I want to pin and I click the pin visual.
• 04:46 If I don't have a dashboard it asks me would I like to put it on a new dashboard
• 04:49 which I get to provide a name.
• 04:51 And then I say pin, and it says hey great would you like to go to the dashboard?
• 04:57 So we'll go to the dashboard and you'll see that I have a dashboard tile.
• 05:00 Notice that when I click on the bar it takes me into the report.
• 05:04 It doesn't cross filter it,
• 05:05 it now brings me to the place where I can actually work with the data.
• 05:09 What else might I want to see?
• 05:11 Maybe I want to pin my total sales.
• 05:13 So click on the tile, click pin visual, and you'll notice
• 05:16 now that I can pin it to an existing or another new dashboard, so I'll say Pin.
• 05:20 I'm gonna ignore that one, gonna click on Units Sold, and pin this guy too.
• 05:27 To the existing dashboard and maybe as well we'll pin the last sale date.
• 05:34 And now, if I miss these little windows, let's say that they go away.
• 05:39 And I want to see my dashboard.
• 05:41 I can go to My Workspace.
• 05:43 I can click on Dashboards.
• 05:45 I could go back to my Reports.
• 05:48 Go my Dashboard, and click on Load Pencil and it will bring me in to look at it.
• 05:52 And again, I can move some tiles around as well, or
• 05:56 I could resize things if I do not want to see them quite as big,
• 05:59 in order to make my dashboard view to look the way that I actually want to see it.

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