Power BI service

Dashboards are something that differentiates Power BI service from Power BI Desktop.

The main features of your Power BI service UI are the following:

1. Navigation bar 2. Dashboard with tiles 3. Q&A question box 4. Help and feedback buttons 5.Dashboard title 6. Office 365 app launcher 7. Power BI home buttons 8.Additional dashboard actions

The 3 major building blocks of Power BI are: dashboards, reports, and datasets. You can't have dashboards or reports without data (well, you can have empty dashboards and empty reports, but they're not very useful until they have data), so let's start with datasets.

1. Navigation bar (navbar)

Use the navbar to move between the Power BI building blocks: dashboards, reports, and datasets.

Select Get Data to add datasets, reports, and dashboards to Power BI
Expand and collapse the navbar with this icon
Use Search to find specific items in the navbar
Select a plus icon + to create a new dashboard or get a new dataset
The listed Dashboards, Reports, and Datasets are available for you to use. Shared dashboards are read-only and display the shared icon
Dashboard, report, and dataset names usually match the name of the underlying dataset file -- but you can rename them
Right-click a dashboard, report or dataset to display the context-sensitive menu.

Single-click

· a heading to collapse or expand it
· a dashboard to display it
· a report to open it in Reading View
· a dataset to explore it

2. Dashboard with tiles

Dashboards are composed of tiles. Tiles are created in report Editing View, Q&A, and other dashboards and can be pinned from Excel, SSRS, and more. A special type of tile called a widget is added directly onto the dashboard. The tiles that appear on a dashboard were specifically put there by a report creator/owner. The act of adding a tile to a dashboard is called pinning.

For more information, see Dashboards (above).

3. Q&A question box

One way to explore your data is to ask a question and let Power BI Q&A give you an answer, in the form of a visualization. Q&A cannot be used to add content to a report -- only to add content, in the form of tiles, to dashboards.

Q&A looks for an answer in the dataset(s) connected to the dashboard. A connected dataset is one that has at least one tile pinned to that dashboard.

As soon as you start to type your question, Q&A takes you to the Q&A page. As you type, Q&A helps you ask the right question and find the best answer with rephrasings, autofill, suggestions, and more. When you have a visualization (answer) you like, pin it to your dashboard. For more information, see Q&A in Power BI.

4. Full screen, Notifications, Settings, Downloads, Help, and feedback

The icons in the top right corner are your resources for settings, notifications, downloads, getting help, and providing feedback to the Power BI team. Select the double arrow to open the dashboard in Full screen mode.

5. Dashboard title (What dashboard is active?)

It's not always easy to figure out which dashboard is active. The dashboard title appears on the dashboard view page, on the Q&A page, in report Editing View and report Reading View, and when you open a dataset.

6. Office 365 app launcher

The app launcher is designed to help you get to your Office 365 apps.

7. Power BI home

Selecting this returns you to the dashboard that you viewed most recently.

8. Options

This area of the workspace contains icons for interacting with the dashboard. Besides Add tile, Favorite and Share selecting the ellipses reveals options for duplicating, printing, and refreshing the dashboard and more.

Dashboards Vs reports

Reports are often confused with dashboards since they too are canvases filled with visualizations. But there are some major differences.

Capability	Dashboards	Reports
Pages	One page	One or more pages
Data sources	One or more reports and one or more datasets per dashboard	A single dataset per report
Available in Power BI Desktop	No	Yes, can create and view reports in Desktop
Pinning	Can pin existing visualizations (tiles) only from current dashboard to your other dashboards	Can pin visualizations (as tiles) to any of your dashboards. Can pin entire report pages to any of your dashboards.
Subscribe	Can't subscribe to a dashboard	Can subscribe to report pages
Filtering	Can't filter or slice	Many different ways to filter, highlight, and slice
Set alerts	Can create alerts to email you when certain conditions are met	No
Feature	Can set one dashboard as your "featured" dashboard	Cannot create a featured report
Natural language queries	Available from dashboard	Not available from reports
Can change visualization type	No. In fact, if a report owner changes the visualization type in the report, the pinned visualization on the dashboard does not update	Yes
Can see underlying dataset tables and fields	No. Can export data but can't see tables and fields in the dashboard itself.	Yes. Can see dataset tables and fields and values.
Can create visualizations	Limited to adding widgets to dashboard using "Add tile"	Can create many different types of visuals, add custom visuals, edit visuals and more with Editing permissions
Customization	Can do things with the visualizations (tiles) like move and arrange, resize, add links, rename, delete, and display full screen. But the data and visualizations themselves are read-only.	In Reading view you can publish, embed, filter,export, download as .pbix, view related content, generate QR codes, analyze in Excel, and more. In Editing view you can do everything mentioned so far and so much more.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Summary

· Share live reports and dashboards

· Receive data-driven alerts for mobile insights

· Create live, real-time data metric dashboards

· View rich graphical visualizations from complex BI data

· Full suite of BI tools for data visualization and reporting

· Author rich interactive reports with Power BI Desktop

· Share reports among colleagues & users via Power BI Service

· Connect, access and unify data across sources

· Explore up-to-date analytics from real-time BI data

· Query data using natural language questioning

· Transform company data into rich visuals

Ask questions of your data using natural language

The Q&A question box is where you type your question using natural language. Q&A recognizes the words you type and figures out where (which dataset) to find the answer. Q&A also helps you form your question with auto-completion, restatement, and other textual and visual aids.

The answer to your question is displayed as an interactive visualization and updates as you modify the question.

Q&A is interactive and even fun, and, more often than not, one question will lead to many others as the visualizations reveal interesting paths to pursue. Watch Amanda demonstrate using Q&A to create visuals, dig into those visuals, and pin them to dashboards.

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