DA-100 Microsoft Power BI – Part 4 Section 4 – Dashboards

Differences between dashboards and reports

Hello. In this section, we’re going to have a look at dashboards in the power bi service. Now, dashboards and reports sound similar. So what we’re going to do first of all in this video is look at the differences between dashboards and reports. Then we’re going to look at the options associated to do dashboards, and then we’re going to take each of the requirements in the DA 100 exam as a separate video. So some of these videos might be very short, but I thought it would be more convenient if you had a separate video for each item. So first of all, what are the differences between dashboards and reports? Because as I say, the two can be fairly similarly confused. So let’s just remind ourselves what a dashboard looks like. So a dashboard are excerpts from reports that you pin into a dashboard. So I’ve got this one from a previous section. I went into a report and I just pinned it.

So if I go to this role level security one that I’ve just done, and I go to say this particular item, this visualization, and I click on the pin visual so I can pin visual to an existing dashboard, or I can select a new dashboard. So I’ll pin it to the existing dashboard. And then here we have two bits. So as a reminder, reports are files that you make either in power bi service, which contain visualizations, or ones more easily that you create in power bi desktop and upload into the power bi service. Dashboards are excerpts from reports. So how many pages do they have? What? Dashboards can have only one page, whereas reports can have multiple pages.

So these just happen to have one page. But you remember some of the things that we have done, such as this one that we had to look at in part one, level four, multiple pages linked together with buttons. And also we had the drill throughs. So reports can have multiple pages. Dashboards have just the one page. However, you can have additional dashboards if you so wish. So you’re not just restricted to one dashboard. You could have a high level dashboard and then one looking, say just a bikes and one looking at not bikes, for instance. Or you could have different dashboards for different people. So you’re very head and then head of finance, head of purchasing, that sort of thing. So dashboards are just one page. Reports, multiples.

Now reports have just got one data set per report. Now a data set of course, may contain multiple data sources. So you got multiple data sources going into one data set, going into one report. Though actually a data set may go into multiple reports, but each report will only have one data set. However, a dashboard, because it is pinned elements, pinned visualizations from lots of reports, there could be more than one report. There could be more than one data set in a particular dashboard. Now in reports we can do filtering. So if you had any filter set up, we could use them. Over here, we could do slicing. So all possible in reports. This is not possible in dashboards. Dashboards you can see the options are very limited, going into focus mode and that sort of thing. With reports, you can’t see the underlying data, you can export it, but you can’t see the data set tables and fields in the dashboard itself, whereas in reports you can see any data set tables and fields and values that you have permission to see in reports.

In addition to being able to filter and export, you can also view related content, you can also add BOOKMARKS, you can also generate QR codes, analyze in Excel, and so on. None of these are possible in dashboards. However, in dashboards, there are some things that you can do that you can’t do in reports. You can create alerts which will email you when a dashboard meets certain conditions, the data changes and suddenly you’re spending too much money. You need an email alert for that. Additionally, you can set one dashboard to be your featured dashboard, and we’ll see what that means later on. In this section. You can’t do that with reports. There are no such things as a featured report, so hopefully that has cemented your knowledge of dashboards and reports. You now know more about the differences between reports and dashboards. What reports can do that, dashboards can’t, and they have a way around. In the next video, we’re going to have a look at some of the options associated wave.

Manage Tiles on a Dashboard, Set Mobile View, and other Tiles options

In this video, we’re going to have a look at some of the options associated with dashboards. So these are tiles which you can resize by going to the bottom right hand corner, and you can drag them however you wish. Some sizes will be too small for you to be able to go any narrower. And of course, sometimes you won’t be able to see all of the information anywhere. A now, you’ve seen several times how to add to pin a tile into a dashboard from a report. You just go to a particular report and you click on Pin. Now, you can also pin tiles from the Power Bi Q and A. We’ll have a look at that in a few videos time from another dashboard. So let’s go into this dashboard and let’s duplicate this dashboard so you can see the dot dot. We have duplicate dashboard.

So I’m going to call this just the copy, and I’ll may well delete this after this particular video. So what I can do is I can say for this particular one, I want to pin the tile into my copy. So that gives me two of identical or near identical tiles. Now, I should say that the tiles that you’ve got retain the same structure. The data might change, but the structure remains the same. So let’s say, for instance, I go into this, if I click on a tile, it takes me to wherever it was created, a report, say. And if I change this, if I edit this report so that this is no longer a pie chart, but let’s say a bar chart, and I go back into my dashboard. So I’ll save the changes, my dashboard still retains the pie chart.

Now, if the data changes, then this dashboard figure will change this dashboard to pie chart. However, changing the actual element, for example, changing from a pie chart to a bar chart won’t actually be reflected in the dashboard. Now, we could use this to your advantage. Suppose you had a bar chart here and said, this is perfect for this report, but for the dashboard, what I really need is a pie chart. Well, you alter the report, you pin it into the dashboard, and then you change it back in the report. So towels can come from another report, another dashboard, the Q and A. They can also come from an Excel workbook on OneDrive for business. They can also be used with quick insights. That’s where you can get lots and lots of tiles about a particular data set.

You won’t be able to use that with raw level security, however. And you could also get it from an on premises Paginated report from Power Bi Report Server or SQL Server Reporting Services. But if you don’t have SSRS SQL Server, you won’t be getting those. And you can also add a tile right at the top. So suppose I wanted to add some web content or an image. It doesn’t have to be from a report. Maybe you want your company logo or something then.

Absolutely. And you could also add a video maybe from YouTube, in which case clicking on the tile won’t take you to the video itself in a different web page. It will actually start playing the video inside of your dashboard. So let’s have a look at some of the options that you’ve got for the individual tiles. So if I go to my dashboard and click on the dot, dot dot, so I’ll be careful not to get near it and not click on it because you’ll go to the report itself, you can add a comment, you can copy it into Clipboard, which will just look like a JPEG of graphic. You can share it to Microsoft teams, you can go to the report, you can open it in focus mode, so you just see that tile and nothing else. But you can also then see the filters as well. So it’s a bit like a mini report. You can edit any of the details or the title and the subtitle, and you can display when the data was last or refreshed, or you can set a custom link. So if I’ve got a custom link, say Microsoft. com, and I can choose to open the link in the same tab or not, and it needs to start with Http or Https, then when I click on the tile, it won’t take me to report. It will take me to whatever the custom link is that you have just arranged. So that’s in the edit tiles section you can pin the tile to another dashboard or you can delete the tile. So these are all options that you’re.

Dashboards: Options

With regards to the dashboard itself, we’ve seen that you can add a tile, you can share the dashboard, a team, you can add a comment. So let’s add a comment for this particular tile and say look at me and pause that. So now you see, see all of the comments there for the entirety of the dashboard. So add a comment works on a per tile basis. So this other table, let’s put that. So you can either see the comments for a particular tile, or you can see a comments for the entirety of the dashboard. You can see usage statistics. So in other words, wait, how many people use it? How often did they use it? So we can see a little bit of preparation, so how many visitors, that sort of thing. You can see what’s related. So in other words, what reports are required for this dashboard to work, and then what data sets are required. And again, you can see it in lineage view as well.

You can set as featured. So if I click on this as my featured dashboard? Yes, please. Then every time you open the Power Bi service, instead of starting at home, it will start with that dashboard displayed. You can only have one dashboard as a featured. Obviously, if you open Power Bi service, you can’t display two or more dashboards. However, you can favorite more than one dashboard and then they will go into your favorite section, which will also be in your home section. Here you can see now I have favorited that you can subscribe. We will be looking at that in another video. We can’t do this in this particular dashboard because it has roll level security. The alternative is it could be going to SQL Server Analysis Services. Now we’re looking at the web view, but there is also a phone view. So if you’re looking at this dashboard on a mobile phone, then this is how it will be displayed.

And you can say, actually, I don’t want this particular table to be on the phone, it just wouldn’t work. So I will unpin it, or maybe actually I will repin it because I quite like it. And you can adjust where the tiles are. So to go back from the default view, go to the web view and you’ll notice also you can reset the tiles, put them back in their original position, and you can unpinol towels. So you’re starting off with a blank slate. In addition, dashboard theme, we’ll have a look at that as a separate video because it’s one of the specific questions in the DA 100, we’ve seen duplicate dashboard. So that gives you a second copy. You can print the dashboard, so that just puts your printer dialogue box there. You can refresh the dashboard tile so that will get any updated data that might be needed.

Performance Inspector so that shows how you are doing in terms of how much time is required. To generate this dashboard. Here you can see it looking good. And then there are some final settings which allow me to change the dashboard name, the owner description, whether it is featured. For me, I don’t have permission to do that, except I already have done over there, whether I can use question and answer allow comments, and whether I just want Power Bi to be able to do all of the dashboard tile flaws. So when I add a new tile, Power Bi will automatically rearrange tiles. And then finally for the dashboard itself, over here we have a menu, and it’s very simple menu open, rename, remove share to share with other people, just the same as this share over here. And then this settings give you access to all of the settings for dashboards, which just allow you to put the Q and a search box on a particular dashboard wherever dashboard tau floor should be on. So whether it automatically aligns your content to the canvas and these are your dashboard.

Pin a Live Report Page to a Dashboard

In this video we’re going to talk about subscribing to Dashboards or reports. Maybe you need notification when a report has been updated, or maybe you need a link every single day or week. Well, we can do this by using the subscribe at the top. So if I click on this, you can see that we can add a new subscription. So who do you want to subscribe? Well, I’m going to subscribe Jane, for instance. So you can see that the data will be based on what data you’ve got. It’s based on your permissions. So here’s the updated data. Please enjoy. So my message, I can say it should be only when the data has been refreshed. That will be a maximum of once per day or hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.

And if it’s daily, weekly or monthly, then you can schedule a time and a time zone. So maybe you want it at 02:15 p. m. Every day, or maybe you want it arriving for the first thing when people get in. You can specify a start date and an end date. And if you specify hourly, by the way, that’s the first time it will happen, and then it will happen every hour thereafter. You can also specify if it’s weekly, how many times a week do you want? So daily will mean seven days a week. Weekly can mean you can choose how many days a week. So maybe I want it on Mondays and Wednesdays. Now let’s have a look at this bottom thing. You can include in your email a link to the dashboard and you can also allow people to have access to the dashboard. So I’m going to click Save and Close and there is a subscription made. I’m also going to just click inside this visualization to get to this report. And I’m going to subscribe to this report as well.

And we’ll see at the bottom there are a couple of additional things. You could have a thumbnail preview of the report and you can also, if you have got Power Bi Premium, send it as a PDF or PowerPoint, no more than 20 pages and it’s got to be less than 25 megabytes. At the top you can see run. Now, whether it is on on or not. So whether it’s active and you can also delete the subscription. So I’m going to click save and close. So if you want to edit this subscription, you can go into subscribe and you can see here we’ve got this subscription, but also bottom left you can manage all subscriptions. So if I click on that, we’ll get to the subscriptions and you can see that we have got a subscription to an individual report and to a dashboard. And then I can click on the Actions.

There’s only one actions it’s edit and that will take me to the edit screen. Now, there’s just a few ifs first of all, if you’ve got role level security, then you won’t be able to see that in dashboard email subscriptions, there are certain tiles which are not supported. For example, streaming tiles, video tiles, custom web content tiles, and the report subscriptions are tied to the actual name. So if you rename the report, then you will have to recreate your subscription. And of course this is only available for pro level licenses or premium level licenses only.

So these are subscriptions. You can go to a dashboard and click on subscribe and you can subscribe yourself and others to a dashboard to a report. You can say you want it once a day, as many times as you want, you can have it monthly on a particular day or days of the month. And if you are subscribing to a report and you’ve got premium license, you can also view the report report as an attachment to the email.

Use the Q&A Feature

In this video, we are going to pin tiles to dashboards. And before you say hang on, we’ve already discussed that reports, you can have visualizations, you can pin them into dashboards. There are two specific points I want to mention in this particular video. So I’ve now deleted any existing tiles. So this dashboard is completely empty. And I’m going to go go into my original report and I am going to deselect any slices that I’ve got. And I am going to go to this pie chart again and I’m going to pin it. So pin the visual to our existing dashboard. So we’re going to the dashboard. We can see that it is a pie chart. Now, at the top, we have another thing we can do, and it is pinning this page of this report as a tile. So it’s not just pinning one visualization, it’s doing the entire page.

Now, notice what it’s also saying. We now save reports as you last left them, including photos and slices. In the past, it didn’t do that. So if you want to go back to the original state, I will click on reset default. So I’ll just do that first. I’m just going to reset everything. And now I will pin this page of this report to my existing dashboard. So let’s expand this. Now go to my dashboard. And there it is. You might have to scroll down to find it. Now you can interact with this as if it was a report. So I can select different slices, I can select different photos, I can remove the photo or slicer. I can click on any slice of the pie chart. And you can see this is Helmets, and then this is hydration packs. I can do cross filtering, cross highlighting other visuals. As you can see, we’ve got hydration packs now selected.

If I click on clothing that we’ll just have clothing. None of this is being reflected in the above. You can see banks are still the big spender, the big values in this pie chart. Now, this is a live tile. What does that mean? Well, let’s go back into this report that it comes from, and I’m going to edit this report and I’m going to change this from a pie chart into a pie chart. Okay, so we’re going to save the report. So now my report doesn’t have a pie chart, it has a bar chart. Let’s go back into the dashboards. What are you going to be expecting? Well, the top item which was taken from one of the tiles still remains a pie chart. So this pinned visualization will only change when the data changes.

However, because this is a live page, anything I change to the formatting, anything I change to where the tiles are, will be reflected in this live tile. And this is reflected when we go to the report and click on Pinna live page. It says pin live page enables changes to reports to appear in the dashboard tile when the page is refreshed. So that’s not just the data, that’s also the formatting. So that’s the major big point about this video, that you can have an entire page of a report. The second point, I’m just going to go to my Susan’s account and this is one of these reports that I shared category and subcategory, and you may notice a lack of pinning capabilities. So there is a pin there, but it is grayed out. I can’t click on it and you notice pin a live page is also not there. So read only content items that have been shared with you cannot be pinned. These are a few more things about pinning live pages and pinning visualizations and reports that have been shared.

Add a Dashboard Theme

In this video, we’re going to have a look at the question and answer the Q and A for dashboards. Now, firstly, you might not be able to see the Q and A in your dashboard. If you can’t, then either click the dot and go to settings and you can see sure the Q and A search box on this dashboard is selected, or you have to go to file settings. And here you’ve got the Q and in. So allow people to use natural language to ask questions about the data and let them create new visuals from it. So click Save and then at the top we have ask a question about your data. Now, the question is what data? This is a dashboard. A dashboard has got either live pages from reports, so it’s got visualizations pinned from reports. Each report has got a different data set, so there may be multiple data sets that it can use. Now, which dashboard are in? Well, at the top, next to Power Bi, that is where we are currently in. So it is in the My workspace, we have an overall dashboard.

So let’s ask a question. And if you’ve used the Q and A in Power Bi desktop, there’ll be very little here that will be of news to you. So for instance, what is the and product name? So it’s saying oh, do you mean English product name?

Yes, even better. Which has the highest sales price and it will give you an answer which has the highest fact internet sales unit price. So that is in fact all of these. So maybe I’ll say which is the highest customer key? Whatever the answer is, you can always change the question and go, no, actually I want a different one. So I want the highest customer key. There we go. And I’m going to say, I’m going to pin the visual of this. So this isn’t exactly the best visual.

So English product name and sale price by order, date key for instance. And if you got a visual you like, you can pin the visual and say an existing dashboard or a new dashboard. There you go. And it reminds you make sure you can go to a phone view as well. And we’ll go back to our dashboard and there it is. And I can rearrange it, manipulate it how I want. So, question analysis, first of all, make sure it’s enabled if you want it that’s in the settings and then the answer to your questions. If you’ve got a good one, then you can pin it to your dashboard, save you from having to create it in a report and then pinning it from the report into the dashboard.

Dashboard Data Classifications

Now, data keeps changing and maybe you need to know if it goes over a critical amount. Maybe you’ve got a number of sales to do per day or the profit is too low, or maybe you’ve got a negative amount in the bank account and you can do this using alerts. Now, alerts can’t be done on every tile. For instance, try and get alert when a pie chart changes. It doesn’t make much sense. So instead there are three types of tiles you can get alerts to a number tile, otherwise known also as a card, a KPI tile and a gauge tile. So what I’m going to do, in fact internet sales, I am going to have the total of the sales amount. So that is 29 million. And this is in a separate page, just to isolate it from everything else. So now I’m going to publish it to Power Bi. So it’s going to impact on one report.

So notice that Manage Alerts isn’t there for other types of tiles. So I’m going to Manage Alert for this number tile or card, I’m going to add a new alert rule. So I want to know when it changes at all and for that the condition is above zero, but want I instantly being formed of its current value. No, alerts are only sent if your data changes. So above zero means any change, obviously in the lot using negative numbers. Now, how often do you want to be alerted? Once an hour at maximum or once every 24 hours?

I’m going to say every hour and send me email as well. Now, there is another product called Microsoft Power Automate that’s not part of this certification, not part of this calls, but if you want additional actions, you can use that and you can also set a title for the alert. So save and close and it’s done. And I can edit it by going on the dot, dot, dot and Manage Alerts. So I can edit it, I can bin it and so forth. So let’s go back into our data set and I am going to edit this query. What I’m going to do is I’m going to append this query. We’ve covered this in part two of this course and I’m going to append it to itself. So that will double the number of rows close and apply and therefore double the sales amount. It goes off from 29 million once the query changes have been applied to 58 million. So let’s save this and let’s republish this and we will see what happens.

Obviously, this might take up to an hour, so I’m going to pause the video here and see what happens. But let’s just make sure that it has actually worked. We’ll go into our report refresh, and now we have 58 million. Well, it turns out I didn’t need to wait an hour. About two minutes later, I received this email. So alert for sales amount dashboard. Name of the dashboard is overall the measure. Well, that’s the actual alert for sales amount. Current value 58 million.

Threshold zero. I got the little buttons. Go to dashboard and get insights. We’ve also got in the power bi service a notification and you can see it’s above the threshold of zero. Here’s more details about it. And again we can have a look at the manage alerts and you can see it’s what’s been sent. What has been sent is what we wanted. We wanted an email, we wanted it when it was above zero. So you can do this for your own metrics as well. So you can see when something changes. I want to be alerted a maximum every hour or every 24 hours.

Configure Data Alerts

Remember, a report has a single data set and it is possible that a single data set may have more than one report and it’s going to impact multiple dashboards because they are just clippets snippets of reports. So let’s go back in to our Power Bi service and we’re going to our report, which is now two pages and we have this 29. 36 million figure. Well, I’m going to pin this into my overall dashboard and it will be somewhere here. Yes. So I’m going to drag this up to top, so I need to know when this changes. So I’m going to click on the dot next to it and go to Manage Alerts. So notice that Manage Alerts isn’t there for other types of tiles. So I’m going to Manage Alert for this number tile or card, I’m going to add a new alert rule. So I want to know when it changes at all and for that the condition is above zero, but want I instantly being formed of its current value. No, alerts are only sent if your data changes. So above zero means any change, obviously in the lot using negative numbers. Now, how often do you want to be alerted? Once an hour at maximum or once every 24 hours?

So let’s save this and let’s republish this and we will see what happens. Obviously, this might take up to an hour, so I’m going to pause the video here and see what happens. But let’s just make sure that it has actually worked. We’ll go into our report refresh, and now we have 58 million. Well, it turns out I didn’t need to wait an hour. About two minutes later, I received this email. So alert for sales amount dashboard. Name of the dashboard is overall the measure. Well, that’s the actual alert for sales amount. Current value 58 million. Threshold zero.

I got the little buttons. Go to dashboard and get insights. We’ve also got in the power bi service a notification and you can see it’s above the threshold of zero. Here’s more details about it. And again we can have a look at the manage alerts and you can see it’s what’s been sent. What has been sent is what we wanted. We wanted an email, we wanted it when it was above zero. So you can do this for your own metrics as well. So you can see when something changes. I want to be alerted a maximum every hour or every 24 hours.

DA-100 Microsoft Power BI – Part 4 Section 4 – Dashboards

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