Report vs Dashboard
In Power BI, these terms mean specific things: a report is what you build in Desktop — one or more pages of visuals. A dashboard is a single-page pinboard you build in the Power BI Service, pulling visuals from one or more reports. For most beginners, "dashboard" is used loosely to mean any well-designed report page — that's the sense we'll use here.
Layout Principles
- Most important number, top-left. People read top-left to bottom-right — put your headline KPI where eyes land first.
- Group related visuals together. Sales trends near sales totals, not scattered across the page.
- Leave breathing room. A page crammed with 12 charts is harder to read than 5 well-chosen ones.
- Use cards for single numbers. Total Revenue doesn't need a bar chart — a big, clear number often communicates faster.
Adding Interactivity
What separates a Power BI dashboard from a static image is interactivity. The core tools:
- Slicers — visible filter buttons/dropdowns users can click (e.g. filter by Year or Region)
- Cross-filtering — clicking a bar in one chart automatically filters the others on the page (on by default)
- Drill-down — right-click a visual to go from Year → Quarter → Month on the same chart
- Drill-through — jump from a summary page to a detail page for just the item you clicked
- Conditional formatting — color cells or bars based on value, so problems jump out visually
Design Mistakes To Avoid
Too many colors. Stick to 2–3 core colors plus a neutral gray — a rainbow of chart colors makes reports look busy, not informative.
Charts without context. A number alone means little — always show it against a target, a prior period, or an average.
Pie charts for too many categories. Beyond 4–5 slices, a bar chart is almost always easier to read.