The 21 Power BI Dashboard Design Best Practices

Table Of Content

• Ready to improve your reports?Get free access today.
• Enhancing Data Representation in Looker Studio
• Step-By-Step Power BI Dashboard Design and Customization Tutorial
• Pick a Color Theme and Font Style
• Best Practices to make Effective Power BI dashboards (Bonus Tips included)
• Getting Started with Data Importing and Preparation in Power BI

So, before you start making the dashboard, ask yourself one simple question- “Who is going to consume the dashboard? To make your data visualization self-updating, toggle on the Automatic data refresh and schedule your data exports. You can select an update interval from once per month to every 15 minutes. It collects information from the hospital administration and reports submitted by hospital staff.

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Ready to improve your reports?Get free access today.

I’ve never been a good dashboard designer, but over time I understood how to recognize dashboards that were not working well. When I started working with Daniele Perilli, I’ve seen that “beautiful” was not enough. A dashboard is a communication tool, and there is a huge bibliography of what you should do and what you should not. If you're looking to get a feel for how we've built the reports above, why not try out our demo template. The demo template and dashboards above were all built using the Numerro Toolkit. We built the Toolkit to make it easier and faster for Power BI users like yourself to build great looking reports that reap the benefits of implementing design best practice.

Enhancing Data Representation in Looker Studio

(P.S. You can apply these Power BI best practices to other BI platforms too). Then, follow the instructions to connect your Power BI account. The first example in our collection is the automated PPC dashboard created by Coupler.io. Why color is an important part of the Power BI dashboard.

Step-By-Step Power BI Dashboard Design and Customization Tutorial

So, the best way to showcase the data through a BI platform is through dashboards. In the example below, you can see a Google Analytics dashboard built in Power BI. It shows website traffic data, along with insights on when and how users visit the site the most actively. This dashboard is an officially provided sample offered by the Microsoft Power BI team.

The problem is that the labels are long and they are displayed diagonally, otherwise they would be completely trimmed and you couldn't even read them. But if you want to read the labels like this, you need to tilt your head and your neck starts to hurt. If you hate your boss, it's okay, but it's considered a bad practice. Women's clothing category is also under-performing in the other chain but to a lesser extent. You can easily understand not only what is good or bad, but exactly how bad it is.

First, we should switch it to a Zebra BI visual to get a completely different chart - a waterfall chart. Once you start visualizing variances, you have many, many options but we recommend you use the waterfall chart. For the first time, this chart shows total sales from January to August and the percentage of variance. There is actually some kind of a comparison here, a forecast, baseline costs and actual cost. However, they are displayed in completely separate charts, making it really difficult to compare all these data categories.

BONUS: Few Extra Tips For Making The Best Use Out Of Power BI Dashboards

So the next time you perfect your design, try testing it with the end users. This would also keep the end-users in the loop about the progress and workings of the design. At first glance, there is one thing you can understand, it has the Balance sheet details. Look at the details, the balance sheet is balanced, and it talks about the key financial ratios and the composition of both assets and liabilities. The BI dashboard has been made clearly with the end-user in mind.

This dashboard can help you manage projects and allocate resources effectively. The main focus here is on tracking project status, estimating at a glance whether everything is going according to the schedule, and allocating resources efficiently. You can use it to analyze where your leads are coming from, track dynamics to manage your sales efforts, and make accurate predictions. You can define which geographic regions bring the most results, which sales representatives are the most effective and those that may need help, and so on. You can also analyze the reasons for lost deals in different regions to devise countermeasures and adjust your strategy.

One of the key features of Power BI is its ability to integrate with other Microsoft tools such as Excel, SharePoint, and Dynamics 365. This integration allows users to easily import data from these tools and create powerful visualizations and reports. Additionally, Power BI offers a wide range of customization options, including the ability to create custom visuals and add custom code. This flexibility allows businesses to tailor their analytics to their specific needs and gain deeper insights into their operations. Power BI is a data visualization tool that allows you to connect to various data sources, create custom dashboards, and gain insights from your data.

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Well-designed reports improve the end-user experience by making the information easier to digest and navigate, easing the frustration of the users. Ultimately, Power BI is one of the most widely used corporate reporting and data visualisation tools by companies. However, it is common that as data sets grow, reporting performance declines.

This data is then displayed in the dashboard in the form of graphs, tables, and scorecards. This allows personnel to instantly check information on available beds, equipment in use, and patient status. It’s a great tool to quickly estimate the situation and see what’s needed and what’s available across the facility. In this case, the dashboard shows how many times users contacted the support department (open cases) and what channels they use most actively to reach out (channel popularity overview). The dashboard also allows you to track the performance of the team members. This is a detailed operational dashboard showing the day-to-day operations of a customer support department.

This will help you to create an actionable dashboard while avoiding typical mistakes and benefitting from useful pro tips. There is a huge variety of marketing activities, from social media marketing and email marketing to comprehensive advertising campaigns. To make data-driven decisions, marketing professionals can use a whole set of dashboards for different types of marketing activities. In our example, we have a competitive marketing analysis report. It allows you to track how marketing efforts drive sales across different channels over time. From marketing and finance to logistics and project management, let’s explore the best Power BI dashboard examples.

Proximity here refers to grouping elements of similar use together or based on their location i.e proximity. Similarity means using the visual perception of the audience by grouping similar fonts and colors together. And ultimately Enclosure, which essentially means showing physical demarcation by a visual border or shading to make them a part of a group. Power BI has the capability to let the user make all three types of dashboards. Before we jump into making the dashboards and identify the best practices, it is important to identify what is that you want to present. Always keep in mind the end-user and what it is that she/he wants to know about.

It is common for companies to share their corporate reports with partners and customers. In addition, if the tool is being put to good business use, employees from different departments and with different needs will work on or consult the same report. Custom visuals are often not verified by Microsoft and therefore their performance and loading can be slow.

In this chart, the leftmost bar showing the plan is light gray and the dark gray bar is the actual. Instead, we used a slightly different shape with this outline. Because a plan is like an outline that you steer and then you fill it up with your actuals as you sell your products.

Prioritize 6-10 insights you wish to visualize per report page. Data over time visuals represent the spread of data over a period of time and are displayed to identify trends or changes. Applying the principle of simplicity across your reports will allow you to tell a clear data-story that users can quickly understand and take action on. Prioritize creating a simple but accurate report that presents a carefully selected amount of data to avoid clutter and complexity.