With Microsoft Power BI evolving each month, it is important to stay on top of it so you can use every feature to its fullest. In this tutorial, unveils his best tips and methods for designing your dashboards, which will serve you well into 2021 and allow you to stay ahead of your competition.
1. Keep it simple
Yes, really. We have noted that this can be quite a difficult hurdle to get over. Many times people try to use multiple features at once and they often fail because they just put too many things on a dashboard or just do it in a way that is not very user-friendly.
What you have to have in mind when designing dashboards in Power BI are the end-users. They are not necessarily Power BI ninjas and they will not necessarily find all the little features and click on all the slicers that you’ve put on your dashboard. For many of them, the experience of just consuming the dashboard can be quite overwhelming. Let’s take for example one of the default Power BI dashboard layouts.
When you land on this page as an end-user, as a manager, it’s really hard to understand, whether you are doing good or bad. Is the performance good? How good? Is it bad? How bad? Although they may have a lot of information, a lot of slicers and options, there is nowhere in particular to focus attention and it’s not very intuitive to find out how to get the details and the insights. With every tile, many more questions arise.
The two characteristics of great Power BI dashboards
You need to set two goals for the start.
First of all, your dashboards need to be understandable. You, as an end-user, need to understand what you’re looking at, you need to understand the data categories and everything that is presented to you.
Once you understand it, it needs to help you guide your attention and act upon it. They must become actionable.
2. The layout
This is the Power BI dashboard example:
First, it needs to have a layout that people will understand. You should have a key KPIs on the top left part of your dashboard. Around it, you need to provide some context in order for people to understand. You’re more or less on the plan in October with your revenue, it looks like 0.6%, so right on the plan. This is good. So how did we achieve that?
The tiles around are the context that explains this. On a landing page, you want to keep your information short and sweet and especially focused on the most important data categories – the ones that have contributed the most to your end result.
3. Tooltips
Let’s create tooltips that will “wow” your end-users. Note: This is one of our most popular Power BI dashboard tips, both with report creators and end-users.
First of all, you need to design a separate page, you can do so by pressing the “+” icon in the bottom. In our case, we named the page “tooltip”. You then put a chart onto the page and design it, and you need to make sure that the tooltip is not too big.
When you’re designing, go to the “page information”. To make this a tooltip that will appear on another visual somewhere else, you need to turn on the tooltip option. This now means that this page can be used as a tooltip anywhere else on your dashboard and in your report. Then go to the page size and switch from the default to tooltip.
The image gets really, really big because Power BI always switches the pages by default to fit the page. So when you’re designing tooltips, make sure to then switch the page view to the actual size which will give you an idea of how much real estate you actually have.
Limit the number of items
Now, it’s really important that you don’t put a lot of elements in this little chart since you don’t have a lot of space. So it is best to make sure that you present only the most important information in the tooltip.
One of the best ways to do this is to use the top N feature in Zebra BI. For example, you have a lot of variables, in this case, countries. There are some countries that have contributed very positively to your results. Then you have a lot of countries that are more or less on the plan, so you don’t need to concern yourself with them since there was no variance. But then, at the bottom, you still have some countries that are, again, very interesting because they had a really big negative variance.
So we would like to show only the most important information, so the countries with the biggest variance. Under categories, you can enable the top/bottom N, where you have several options. Because we’re doing it for the variance, we select top + bottom N, which means that Zebra BI will automatically take, a certain number of the countries that have either positive or negative variance.
You can choose the specific number in the “Items” field. So we actually calculate the absolute value here. What’s great is that everything else is automatically summed up in the “others” elements. Zebra BI automatically adds to this shortened data set so that the grand total is actually the sum of all of the elements. This is quite important. Now you will always have the best performing and the lowest-performing countries.
Adding the tooltip to a visual
Now you have this short tooltip you can just add it to any visual you want. You can go under “Visualization” settings and then select the “Tooltip” section. The “Page” field will be “auto” by default, which results in the basic black tooltip that it’s not really helpful because it just shows you the data that you already see on the visual, so it’s not very useful. So you just flip the field to the tooltip page we created earlier. This is actually the name of the page that we earlier enabled to be used as a tooltip.
Make tooltips “smart”
All right. Now, if you have a business unit that has a negative variance to plan, you want to know why. Here, when you hover your mouse over this variance, you get the breakdown of the countries that had the biggest impact, either positive or negative, that contributed to this total variance in this business unit. These are the smart report page tooltips.
The next thing is how do you do the interaction? When you want more details, you can simply slide on the right and now you’ll get more information, like the values, relative growth and absolute growth from the previous year.
But this is still not enough. What you can do, is to simply click once and dive into a detailed report on business units. Just one click and now you go from the first overview landing page to a detailed report.
Tip: Provide a view that is more visual and contains less information, but then allow the user to just click once and get all the details
4. Dynamic chart titles
Now this detailed report, of course, has all the business units. These business units are structured so you have a hierarchical table that you can expand and collapse and see all the details. There’s a little dynamic title that helps end-users understand what they are looking at.
Because Power BI allows heavy filtering, cross-filtering, slicing and dicing, the end-users often have a problem since they don’t know what filters are enabled at a certain point in time. So it’s nice if you’re able to just add dynamic chart titles that will expose the filters that are enabled.
5. Page navigation
Of course, you can now have several ways how to present the information on your business unit. You can, for example, add another view, something like a tabbed page navigation. These are just native Power BI buttons with very simple page navigation and they all refer to your business units report.
On the other hand, the slicers enable you to simply click and switch different types of use. These slicers use DAX tricks to change visual dynamically For example, revenue, gross profit, trends, etc. Still, they are all about my business unit.
Once you understand the situation, you have some sort of navigation that brings you back to the landing page. This is called a two-layer master-detail or overview detail design pattern for dashboards that we believe works quite nicely. First, you have the landing page and then you allow users to navigate through the landing page to the detailed report pages. So this is kind of the basic pattern that we are striving to use all the time.
6. Buttons
Buttons are very, very simple in Power BI, especially with the latest version. You can insert a button on the top bar and there are different types of buttons you can try. The right arrow example is the same button we have used here as well.
The most important property of this button is the action, which determines what the button should do.
On the right side, under “visualization”, you have a group of settings called “the action” and you can choose from a few types of actions. We mostly use “page navigation” in all of the Power BI dashboards that you can see in the webinar.
After choosing the type you must also choose a destination. Simply select the page that you want this button to lead to. In this case, this is a report by a business unit. And so, the user can now click on this created button and they will arrive at the determined page.
Trick: place a button over the logotype
Then you can allow users to go back to the landing page, which can be done by the arrow on the top.
In this case, we have actually placed this “home” button on top of the logotype. You can override the logotype button by adding another button on top of it. This is all a part of the page header, which you can further manipulate on the right. As you see, the logotype is below the home button, which has the action. We have used fixed page navigation and then the destination is back to the landing page, so you can go back.
You can use the same method to create a “Drill through” button and the tabs for Trends, all KPIs, etc.
Designing the buttons
Now you can design each button. For example, we have designed a button to be invisible, but it becomes visible again when you hover with your mouse over the title in the visual.
How do you do this? On the right, under “visualizations”, you can edit features, like the state, which is the most important in our case. If you just type the text while the state is the default, this means that the text will be visible.
If you want to have an empty button, then you first switch the state to “on hover” which means when the user will move the mouse on top of the button, it will become visible. Now you can type the text you want, for example, “Click to go to the next page.”
It is important that you leave the text field empty while the state is defined as “default”.
You can also edit other properties, like font, colors, and alignment of the text.
The icon can also be made visible only when hovered over it, by using the same principle as with the text. Under where you edited “button text”, you can also edit “Icon”. While in the “default” state select the blank shape, and while “On hover” state select the right arrow.
Now the entire button is invisible unless you hover over it. Again, you can edit other properties of the icon.
7. Help tutorials
OK, you’ve reached the most important of our Power BI dashboard tips!
The is the part of the dashboard that we are most proud of. It also took the most time.
When you click the help button, you get help tutorials that will assist end-usersin understanding how to use the dashboard.
Clicking on the question mark button has dimmed my dashboard and has provided some helpful tutorials on top of my dashboard.
How do you do this? This one is a little bit more tricky but, in essence, the button has an action, like before, but this time you’re not navigating to another page. Instead, you’re making some visuals visible. Those yellow pages and those images with the videos are actually on my page but they are not visible by default.
Showing a comment in a text box
Let’s do a simplified example of that first, like a text box. You can do that by clicking the “insert” tab and then “Text box”. You can edit it to your own preference.
We want this element to appear on top of my dashboard when the user will press a button, which you can do by adding a bookmark. Navigate to view and click on bookmarks. Now you can add a bookmark and you can rename it by double-clicking. Now, Power BI has remembered this new bookmarked state.
If you go back to the previous, initial state, you then hide the text box. Now that this comment is hidden, you can add a bookmark for this state with the hidden comment as well. You now have these two states, the two bookmarks, one with comment shown, one with it invisible.
What you want to do for this button, is tosimply invoke the bookmark where the comment is shown, and you do this by selecting the desired button, for example, the “help” button, and going to the “action” on the right, under “visualization”. You select the type “bookmark” and select the “Comment Shown” bookmark you just created. If you’re in Power BI Desktop, then you need to press control + click on the button. And so the button invokes the bookmark, comment shown.
Tip: Of course, now you could make another button, like the X button and do the reverse thing – make the comment go away once clicked.
Adding the background overlay
Another element in this example is making the background, the dashboard, grayed out. This element is actually a huge button with an enabled background. We have used the gray color and put the transparency to 36%. So it’s a simple, overlaid rectangle that is slightly transparent and gray.
You can use a text box for that or any other shape or a rectangle. But the button is actually the best way to do this because you can not only do it gray and transparent, but you can also tie an action to it to close the whole tutorial. Because this is a huge button, the user can click on it which will trigger this action and the action is a bookmark where the overlay is hidden, which brings me back to my default state without all of those tutorials and elements on top of my dashboard.
Adding animated GIF images
This is the best part of this Power BI dashboard tip.
Let’s show the “help” animated GIF one more time:
How did we do this? We’ve used a trick here to actually put small videos that are actually animated GIF images embedded in the Power BI report.
You can click on the next tip and you see again another GIF that, of course, we have recorded beforehand and then we included it into this help feature of the dashboard here.
You can then just simply click anywhere to close the help section, and you’re back to your dashboard.
But, there’s a problem.
Sure, Power BI allows you to add images. But if you add animated GIFs, Power BI will not play them when inserted as an image element.
Note: If you just simply add a GIF image in Power BI, it will not be played.
So you need another trick to make an animated GIF play automatically.
The way to do that is first to add a native chart, it doesn’t really matter which chart. Now you can go to the settings and input some data inside. It really does not matter what, you just need to put it on the axis, preferably something really short.
This will allow you to access other settings of the chart. What we are interested in is the “plot area” where we can add an image.
So this is the workaround. It’s kind of messy but that’s probably the best way to add animated GIFs to your Power BI dashboards.
8. Negative KPIs
Another smart feature you can use with Zebra BI Custom Visuals is to use the inverted presentation of a chart. For example, on the KPI page we can see that the revenue is growing, the gross profit is growing, but the costs are also growing. Growing costs have a negative impact on your final results. That’s why the cost element in your chart needs to have an inverted logic. In Zebra BI you can right-click on the title of one chart and you just click invert. This is a nice tip on how you present your KPIs.
9. Small multiples
Let’s add business units to the group field by drag-and-drop method.
Now we sales data in waterfall charts for all of the business units. Let’s extend the visual:
But you have a lot of small elements that are not so important. So the top N feature is really important here. You can do it by, for example, just stating the number of elements that you want to display:
Then you see the most important elements and everything else is summed up into the “Others” category. This is how you design detailed pages while keeping the user in mind.
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The Human Resources built-in sample contains a dashboard, report, and dataset for a human resources department. In this sample, the human resources department has the same reporting model across different companies, even when they differ by industry or size. This sample looks at new hires, active employees, and employees who have left. It strives to uncover any trends in the hiring strategy. Our main objectives are to understand:
Who we hire
Biases in our hiring strategy
Trends in voluntary separations
This sample is part of a series that shows how you can use Power BI with business-oriented data, reports, and dashboards. It was created by obviEnce with real data, which has been anonymized. The data is available in several formats: built-in sample in the Power BI service, .pbix Power BI Desktop file, or Excel workbook. See Samples for Power BI.
This tutorial explores the Human Resources built-in sample in the Power BI service. Because the report experience is similar in Power BI Desktop and in the service, you can also follow along by using the sample .pbix file in Power BI Desktop.
You don’t need a Power BI license to explore the samples in Power BI Desktop. If you don’t have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, you can save the sample to your My Workspace in the Power BI service.
Open the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com), sign in, and open the workspace where you want to save the sample.If you don’t have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, you can save the sample to your My Workspace.
In the bottom-left corner, select Get data.
On the Get Data page that appears, select Samples.
Select Human Resources Sample, then choose Connect.
Power BI imports the built-in sample and then adds a new dashboard, report, and dataset to your current workspace.
Get the .pbix file for this sample
Alternatively, you can download the Human Resources sample as a .pbix file, which is designed for use with Power BI Desktop.
Get the Excel workbook for this sample
If you want to view the data source for this sample, it’s also available as an Excel workbook. The workbook contains Power View sheets that you can view and modify. To see the raw data, enable the Data Analysis add-ins, and then select Power Pivot > Manage. To enable the Power View and Power Pivot add-ins, see Explore the Excel samples in Excel for details.
New hires
Let’s explore new hires first.
In your workspace, select the Dashboards tab, and open the Human Resources Sample dashboard.
On the dashboard, select the New Hire Count, New Hires Same Period Last Year, Actives YoY % Change By Month tile.
The Human Resources Sample report opens to the New Hires page.
Look at these items of interest:
The New Hire Count, New Hires SPLY and Actives YoY % Change by Month combo chart shows we hired more people every month this year compared to last year. Significantly more people in some months.
In the combo chart New Hire Count and Active Employee Count by Region and Ethnicity, notice we’re hiring fewer people in the East region.
The New Hires YoY Var by Age Group waterfall chart shows we’re hiring mainly younger people. This trend may be due to the mostly part-time nature of the jobs.
The New Hire Count by Gender pie chart shows a roughly even split.
Can you find more insights? For example, a region where the gender split is not even.
Select different age groups and genders in the charts to explore the relationships between age, gender, region, and ethnicity group.
Select Human Resources Sample from the black Power BI header bar to see detailed information about the dashboard.
Compare currently active and former employees
Let’s explore data for currently active employees and employees who no longer work for the company.
On the dashboard, select the Active Employee Count by Age Group tile.
The Human Resources Sample report opens to the Active Employees vs. Separations page.
Look at these items of interest:
The two combo charts on the left show the year-over-year change for active employees and employee separations. We have more active employees this year due to rapid hiring, but also more separations than last year.
In August, we had more separations compared to other months. Select the different age groups, genders, or regions to see if you can find any outliers.
Looking at the pie charts, we notice we have an even split in our active employees by gender and age groups. Select different age groups to see how the gender split differs by age. Do we have an even split by gender in every age group?
Reasons for separation
Let’s look at the report in Editing View. You can change the pie charts to show employee separations data instead of active employee data.
Select Edit report in the upper-left corner.
Select the Active Employee Count by Age Group pie chart.
In Fields, select Employees to expand the Employees table. Clear Active Employee Count to remove that field.
Select Separation Count in the Employees table to add it to the Values box in the Fields area.
On the report canvas, select the Voluntary bar in the Separation Count by Separation Reason bar chart.This bar highlights those employees who left voluntarily in the other visuals in the report.
Select the 50+ slice of the Separation Count by Age Group pie chart.
Look at the line chart in the lower-right corner. This chart is filtered to show voluntary separations.
Notice the trend in the 50+ age group. During the latter part of the year, more employees over age 50 left voluntarily. This trend is an area to investigate further with more data.
You can also follow the same steps for the Active Employee Count by Gender pie chart, changing it to separations instead of active employees. Look at the voluntary separation data by gender to see if you find any other insights.
Select Human Resource Sample from the top nav pane to return to the dashboard. You can choose to save the changes you’ve made to the report.
Bad hires
The last area to explore is bad hires. Bad hires are defined as employees who didn’t last for more than 60 days. We’re hiring rapidly, but are we hiring good candidates?
Select the Bad Hires as % of Actives by Age Group dashboard tile. The report opens to tab three, Bad Hires.
Select Northwest in the Region slicer on the left and select Male in the Bad Hire Count by Gender donut chart. Look at the other charts on the Bad Hires page. Notice there are more male bad hires than females and many Group A bad hires.
If you look at the Bad Hire Count by Gender donut chart and select different regions in the Region slicer, you’ll notice that the East region is the only region with more female than male bad hires.
Select the name of the dashboard from the top nav pane to return to the dashboard.
Ask a question in the dashboard Q&A box
In the Q&A question box in the dashboard, you can ask a question about your data by using natural language. Q&A recognizes the words you type and figures out where in your dataset to find the answer.
Select the Q&A question box. Notice that even before you start typing, Q&A displays suggestions to help you form your question.
You can pick one of those suggestions, or enter: show age group, gender, and bad hires SPLY where region is East.
Notice most of the female bad hires are under 30.
Next steps: Connect to your data
This environment is a safe one to play in, because you can choose not to save your changes. But if you do save them, you can always select Get data for a new copy of this sample.
We hope this tour has shown how Power BI dashboards, Q&A, and reports can provide insights into sample data. Now it’s your turn; connect to your own data. With Power BI, you can connect to a wide variety of data sources.
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The Customer Profitability sample contains a dashboard, report, and dataset for a company that manufactures marketing materials. This dashboard was created by a CFO to see key metrics about their five business unit managers (executives), products, customers, and gross margins (GM). At a glance, they can see what factors are impacting profitability.
This sample shows how you can use Power BI with business-oriented data, reports, and dashboards. It was created by obviEnce with real data, which has been anonymized. The data is available in several formats: a built-in sample in the service, a .pbix Power BI Desktop file, or an Excel workbook. See Samples for Power BI.
This tutorial explores the built-in Customer Profitability sample in the Power BI service. Because the report experience is similar in Power BI Desktop and in the service, you can also follow along by using the sample .pbix file in Power BI Desktop.
You don’t need a Power BI license to explore the samples in Power BI Desktop. If you don’t have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, you can save the sample to your My Workspace in the Power BI service.
Open the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com), sign in, and open the workspace where you want to save the sample.
If you don’t have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, you can save the sample to your My Workspace.
In the bottom-left corner, select Get data.
On the Get Data page that appears, select Samples.
Select Customer Profitability Sample, then choose Connect.
Power BI imports the sample, adding a new dashboard, report, and dataset to your current workspace.
Get the .pbix file for this sample
Alternatively, you can download the Customer Profitability sample as a .pbix file, which is designed for use with Power BI Desktop.
Get the Excel workbook for this sample
If you want to view the data source for this sample, it’s also available as an Excel workbook. The workbook contains Power View sheets that you can view and modify. To see the raw data, enable the Data Analysis add-ins, and then select Power Pivot > Manage. To enable the Power View and Power Pivot add-ins, see Explore the Excel samples in Excel for details.
What is our dashboard telling us?
In the workspace where you saved the sample, find the Customer Profitability dashboard and select it:
Company-wide dashboard tiles
Open the dashboard in the Power BI service. The dashboard tiles give our CFO a view of the high-level company metrics important to them. When they see something interesting, they can select a tile to dig into the data.
Review the tiles on the left side of the dashboard.
Note the following details:
The company’s gross margin is 42.5%.
It has 80 customers.
It sells five different products.
It had its lowest revenue % variance to budget in February, followed by the highest in March.
Most of our revenue comes from the east and north regions. Gross margin has never exceeded budget, with the ER-0 and MA-0 business units requiring further investigation.
Total revenue for the year is close to budget.
Manager-specific dashboard tiles
The tiles on the right side of the dashboard provide a team scorecard. The CFO needs to keep track of their managers and these tiles give them a high-level overview of profit, by using GM%. If the GM% trend is unexpected for any manager, then they can investigate further.
By analyzing the manager-specific dashboard tiles, we can make the following observations:
All executives, except Carlos, have already exceeded their target sales. However, Carlos’ actual sales are the highest.
Annelie’s GM% is the lowest, but we see a steady increase since March.
Valery, on the other hand, has seen their GM% drop significantly.
Andrew had a volatile year.
Explore the dashboard’s underlying data
This dashboard has tiles that link to a report and to an Excel workbook.
Open the Excel Online data source
Two tiles on this dashboard, Target vs Actual and Year Over Year Revenue Growth were pinned from an Excel workbook. When you select either of these tiles, Power BI opens the data source: in this case, Excel Online.
Select Target vs Actual. Excel Online opens within the Power BI service.
Notice that the workbook has three tabs worth of data. Open COGS.
Total revenue is exceeding costs by a healthy margin. The shape of the Total revenue line and height of the costs columns are similar. Interact with the data by filtering slicing, drilling, and more. For example, let’s look at Revenue vs COGS for just one Industry.
a. From the Industry slicer, select Retail.
b. We see that only two district managers cover the retail industry: Andrew and Carlos.
c. Total revenue is exceeding costs by a healthy margin until 2014 quarter 3. And looking at the stacked column, we see some strange data that bears further examination. Did we truly have no costs for July? Did we get a refund from a third party?
Continue exploring. If you find something interesting, select Pin from the upper-right corner to pin it to a dashboard.
Use your browser’s back arrow to return to the dashboard.
Open the underlying Power BI report
Many of the tiles on the Customer Profitability sample dashboard were pinned from the underlying Customer Profitability sample report.
Select one of these tiles to open the report in Reading view.
If the tile was created in Q&A, selecting it opens the Q&A window. Select Exit Q&A to return to the dashboard and try a different tile.
The report has three pages. You can select the page you want from the Pages pane on the left.
Team Scorecard focuses on the performance of the five managers and their books of business.
Industry Margin Analysis provides a way to analyze the profitability compared to what’s happening in the entire industry.
Executive Scorecard provides a view of each of the managers, in a custom page size format.
Team Scorecard page
Let’s look at two of the team members in detail and see what insights can be gained:
In the Executive slicer on the left, select Andrew’s name to filter the report page to display only data about Andrew:
For a quick KPI, look at Andrew’s Revenue Status (Total Year); it’s green, which means he’s performing well.
The Revenue % Variance to Budget by Month and Executive chart shows that, except for a dip in February, Andrew is doing well. Andrew’s most dominant region is the east region, which includes 49 customers, and five out of seven products. Andrew’s GM% is not the highest or the lowest.
The RevenueTY and Revenue % Var to Budget by Month chart shows a steady, even-profit story. However, if you filter by selecting the square for Central in the region treemap, you discover that Andrew has revenue only in March and only in Indiana. Is this trend intentional or is it something that needs looking into?
Now on to Valery. In the Executive slicer, select Valery’s name to filter the report page to display data only about Valery.
Notice the red KPI for Revenue Status (Total Year). This item definitely needs further investigation.
Valery’s revenue variance also paints a worrying picture; Valery is not meeting set revenue margins.
Valery has only nine customers, handles only two products, and works almost exclusively with customers in the north region. This specialization could explain the wide fluctuations in the metrics.
If you select the North square in the tree map, it shows that Valery’s gross margin in the north region is consistent with the overall margin.
Selecting each of the other Total Revenue by Region squares tells an interesting story: their GM% ranges from 23% to 79%. Valery’s revenue numbers, in all regions except the north region, are extremely seasonal.
Continue exploring to find out why Valery’s area is not performing well. Look at regions, the other business units, and the next page in the report: Industry Margin Analysis.
Industry Margin Analysis
This report page provides a different slice of the data. It looks at gross margin for the entire industry, broken down by segment. The CFO uses this page to compare company and business unit metrics to industry metrics to help them explain trends and profitability. You might wonder why the Gross Margin % by Month and Executive chart is on this page, because it’s team-specific. Having it here lets us filter the page by business unit manager.
How does profitability vary by industry? How do the products and customers break down by industry? To answer these questions, select one or more industries from the top left (start with the CPG industry). To clear the filter, select the eraser icon.
On the Revenue Var % to Budget, GM%, and RevenueTY by Industry bubble chart, the CFO looks for the largest bubbles, because they have the biggest impact on revenue. To easily see each manager’s impact by industry segment, filter the page by select each manager’s name in turn in the area chart.
As you select each manager in the chart, note the following details:
Andrew’s area of influence spans many different industry segments with widely varying GM% (most on the positive side) and Var%.
Annelie’s chart is similar, except that Annelie only concentrates on a handful of industry segments with a focus on the Federal segment and a focus on the Gladius product.
Carlos has a clear focus on the services segment, with good profit. Carlos has also greatly improved Var% for the High Tech segment and a new segment, Industrial, performed exceptionally well compared to budget.
Tina works with a handful of segments and has the highest GM%, but the mostly small size of the bubbles shows that Tina’s impact on the company’s bottom line is minimal.
Valery, who is responsible for only one product, works in only five industry segments. Valery’s industry influence is seasonal but always produces a large bubble, indicating a significant impact on the company’s bottom line. Do the industry segments explain their negative performance?
Executive Scorecard
This page has a custom page size format.
Dig into the data by asking questions with Q&A
For our analysis, it might be helpful to determine which industry generates the most revenue for Valery. Let’s use Q&A.
From the top of the dashboard, select Ask a question about your data to open the Q&A question box.
Type total revenue by industry for Valery in the question box. Notice how the visualization updates as you type the question.
As you can see, the Services industry is the biggest revenue area for Valery.
Dig deeper by adding filters
Let’s take a look at the Distribution industry.
Open the Industry Margin Analysis report page.
Without selecting any visualizations on the report page, expand the filter pane on the right (if it isn’t already expanded). The Filters pane should display only page level filters.
Locate the filter for Industry and select the arrow to expand the list. Let’s add a page filter for the Distribution industry. First, clear all selections by clearing the Select All checkbox. Then select Distribution only.
The Gross Margin % by Month and Executive chart tells us that only Valery and Tina have customers in this industry and Valery worked with this industry only from June to November.
Select Tina and then Valery in the Gross Margin by Month and Executive chart legend. Notice Tina’s portion of the Total Revenue by Product chart is small compared to Valery.
To see actual revenue, select the Q&A box in the dashboard and enter total revenue by executive for distribution by scenario.
We can similarly explore other industries and even add customers to our visuals to understand causes for Valery’s performance.
Next steps: Connect to your data
This environment is a safe one to play in, because you can choose not to save your changes. But if you do save them, you can always select Get data for a new copy of this sample.
We hope this tour has shown how Power BI dashboards, Q&A, and reports can provide insights into sample data. Now it’s your turn; connect to your own data. With Power BI, you can connect to a wide variety of data sources.
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When people are asked to define a “financial report”, many would answer that a financial report is ‘a table with numbers’. Financial reports are often associated with Microsoft Excel since we live in a world where you can export almost anything into MS Excel and knowledge of MS Office is considered a de facto basic skill for any employee. For this reason, the words ‘financial report’ has become a synonym of an Excel sheet. However, employees who have already faced implementing a new data strategy in their organization or introducing new business intelligence concepts in their work would say that a report is a visual representation of information with charts and graphs, rather than just a table with figures.
Then, what is Dashboard? An Oxford dictionary says it is ‘the panel facing the driver of a vehicle or the pilot of an aircraft, containing instruments and controls’ (Oxford University Press, n.d.).’ At first sight, it sounds confusing in our context, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, imagine that you are driving a car and sitting in front of the driver’s dashboard. But your car is more than an ordinary vehicle – it is the entire organization you are working. What would you place on this dashboard? What measures the health and growth of your company and is vital for a safe ‘road trip’? What KPIs are important for your team leader or head of the department?
In the diverse variety of business intelligence tools available on the software market, a report can be defined differently. However, Dashboard has always been serving one main purpose: to represent KPIs via gauges, tiles with big numbers, intuitively understandable trends, etc. In this article, we will look at similar features of reports and dashboards in Power BI and discuss their distinctions.
Report in Power BI
Each Power BI Desktop file (file with ‘pbix’ extension) represents one report. At the same time, you may see that in Power BI Desktop you can have multiple tabs or, according to the Microsoft terminology, pages. On top of that, each of the pages may contain several visuals (see common visual examples here: Visualization types in Power BI).
Let’s consider, for instance, a sample Microsoft Power BI file which you can download from Microsoft GitHub account by using this link or from the attachment to this article:
On the picture above, we can see that ‘1’ and ‘2’ are visuals located on the ‘Overview’ page. At the same time, ‘Overview’, ‘Germany’, ‘Canada’ and other tabs on the bottom – ‘3’ – represent Power BI pages. All the pages are parts of one report associated with the file – 2018SU05 Blog Demo – May.pbix:
Overall, the relationship between visuals, pages, report and ‘pbix’ file looks like this:
Visual types, pages, report and file names are given as examples. In reality, you are not required to create an Overview page as the first one and detailed pages as the second one; although, it is considered to be a good approach to tell your data story starting from general information and then going deeper into details. Also, you can choose any number of visuals having diverse types for any page of your report.
Dashboard in Power BI
A dashboard can be combined with one or several Power BI reports. However, this doesn’t mean that a dashboard should contain all the visuals from all the pages of a report. Instead, you define one-by-one each visual of the report to be included into Power BI Dashboard. I’d like to emphasize that – usually, you are not choosing the whole page of a report to be included, but a particular visual from a particular page. However, the ability to pin the entire report page to a dashboard also exists.
Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that if you are using Power BI Report Server – an on-premises version of Power BI – you cannot create Power BI dashboards. Similarly, you cannot create a dashboard in Power BI Desktop: Power BI service (app.powerbi.com) is the only place where the dashboard can live (at least, it is so at the moment of writing this article).
To create a simple dashboard, you need to publish your Power BI report to Power BI service. Let’s do this with the sample file that we used in the previous section. Sign in to your Power BI account and click on ‘publish:’
You can choose any workspace you have, for example, your personal workspace ‘My workspace’:
Once the report is published, navigate to the ‘reports’ tab in your workspace in Power BI online service:
Then, click on ‘edit report:’
Now, you can add your visual to a dashboard. Click on any visual and then, on the top of the visual, click on ‘Pin visual’:
You will need to provide a name for a dashboard:
Do this for several visuals from different pages. Choose any visuals you like. Finally, click on ‘My Workspace’ on the top and then on your newly created dashboard:
By dragging and dropping, you may rearrange your dashboard tiles:
If you click on any tile on the dashboard, you will be redirected to the report page containing this visual.
Please note that you may add visuals from different reports into one dashboard:
(Microsoft, n.d.)
The example above, basically, shows how dashboards work: you may consume the critical information, but you are not supposed to interact with visuals on the dashboard. A dashboard may be thought about as a website’s homepage – in this case, your analytical website. This page serves as a summary of your analytical content and an entryway to your reports. Overall, having a dashboard is important for a natural navigation flow that should start from summarized information and go into detail where required.
Dashboards vs. Reports
For a beginner, Power BI reports and dashboards often seem to be something very similar. Indeed, the difference may be only felt after you have created a couple of reports with several visuals and have been utilizing them for several weeks. Nevertheless, let’s consider the key differences below.
Firstly, you can create the dashboard only in Power BI service rather than in Power BI Desktop, whereas reports can be created and utilized in both Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service. Additionally, you cannot create a dashboard in Power BI Report Server. Secondly, a dashboard always has one page with content that cannot be filtered or sliced, while a report can have one or many fully interactive pages. Finally, in general, there is plenty of customizations available in a report view and not available for dashboard customization.
You need a report: when you need to actively consume information via interaction, slicing and dicing, drilling down and up while looking for trends, dependencies, and their underlying causes. You are supposed to use reports to explore your data.
You need a dashboard: when you have many reports with many pages, you need an entry point for data consumption and a summary of contents on one canvas.
What Happens In Practice
In practice, BI teams do not always use both dashboards and reports, even in Power BI Service (Power BI online). For example, you cannot create content in Power BI software without designing a report, but you can create and consume visuals without dashboard(s). Also, many Power BI users say that they are using Power BI dashboards while they are interacting only with Power BI reports: for a Power BI rookie, any individual page of a report looks identical to a dashboard.
To sum up, if you have several reports with many pages, it makes sense to render the most critical information on a dashboard: the dashboard will serve as a landing page for your analytical portal: by clicking on any tile on the dashboard a user is being navigated to the page of the report containing the visual from the tile clicked. However, you can always achieve similar functionality by creating a summary report page with buttons and bookmarks, but the process would become more complicated. The essence is that dashboards are created for static observations, whereas reports are designed for a highly interactive experience. Usually, you naturally start building dashboards when you realize that you have too many reports confusing you and your management.
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Today, for any business, Big data is an asset. However, if a company has lots of data and can’t process and segregate it to generate revenue, it’s simply a waste. In such a case, this data set will cause more harm than good.
According to a survey by Forbes, more than 95 percent of businesses face some need to manage unstructured data. In another study, more than 87 percent of participants said that preparing data was critical to them.
If you are struggling with a similar problem, then here is the solution – “Power BI Dashboards.”
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”- Peter Drucker’s
Power BI Dashboards can be of enormous help as they can help you understand data in a more straightforward way.
#1. Customer Analysis Dashboard:
The first dashboard in our list is the Customer Analysis Dashboard is most useful for businesses who want to focus more on their customers. In addition, the dashboard offers valuable insight into profit for regional customers and product sales.
This dashboard can be used in almost every industry where managers and business leaders can analyze business growth. They can even make valuable business decisions to increase revenue, evaluate the profit distribution across customers, and drive profitability.
This dashboard can be handy for businesses that handle large amounts of data as it provides details about total profits and sales, previous and current year sales, and percentage growth.
For instance, a business can use different filters if they want to view data for additional years. Also, managers and owners can gain valuable insight with this dashboard.
Critical insights include product-wise sales analysis, channel-specific sales and profits, and customer-specific growth and profit statistics.
Customers can also use charts to compare sales, profit margins, and product performance and analyze client segmentation.
#2. HR Analytics Dashboard
Today, the HR department is an excellent example of the Power BI dashboard as it plays a massive role in any company. In fact, in the past few years, the scope of work for HRs has only expanded. HR analytics is a data-driven approach to managing people at work. It includes everything from advanced predictive analytics to basic, descriptive statistics.
According to a report, more than 22% of companies have adopted HR analytics, while 11% have adopted the role itself.
The dashboard offers its users an accurate representation of the firm’s finances in terms of:
Cost to Company (CPC)
CPC by Departments
Compensation, Salary, Bonus, Overtime, and more
Lastly, it offers an overview of the individual employee, including
Employee personal information
Financial details
Current position
Absenteeism report
Performance
Annual leaves
#3. Sales Scorecard Dashboard
Businesses need to track their sales for different purposes contently. But, with too much data, it might get a little hectic to keep track of everything.
Sales Scorecard dashboard is a simple answer to several different questions. It helps business organizations track their sales and answer all the critical questions about sales performance.
This dashboard leverages several Power BI elements to build KPIs that provide crucial and valuable insights to help sales managers. These Power BI elements include treemaps, cards, shapes, and DAX.
This Power BI dashboard example can provide vital business insight into the areas it’s selling per state, product, and region. This dashboard also gives you the ability to view comparisons of sales and profit against the previous years. This can help them put sales performance into perspective.
Managers can view the cost components of the business that are driving profits or losses. Also, they can filter the dashboard based on year and business segments.
#4. Executive Insights Dashboard
Executive Insights Dashboard is shed light on business performance and its overall health. This dashboard is helpful for business organizations as it allows them to explore company-wide data-driven decision-making.
This Power BI Dashboard example leverages different custom visuals for analysis, such as line charts, pie charts, donut charts, and others.
It also gives business organizations several filters that can help them tell stories about business elements such as total profit and revenue. Managers, marketers, and other users can use it to gain crucial insight into metrics such as:
Profit margin
Average per order quantity
YOY percentage change in Total Profit
Top five products by Total Profit, Quantity, and Revenue
How these three Quantities are Distributed Geographically
Visibility: Executive BI Dashboard offers you excellent visibility and insight to help you constantly know what’s exactly going on in your business.
Ongoing Improvements: Executive Dashboards allow you to measure your performance and thus improve it.
Time Savings: Executive dashboard will always show you the latest results saving your precious hours each month.
Judge Performance Against Your Plan: Executive Dashboard can automatically show your business goals versus your actual, real-time results.
The dashboard allows users to view their company’s overall performance based on specific product types.
#5. Attendance Tracker Dashboard
Attendance Tracker Dashboard is a Power BI dashboard that helps business administrators track employees’ attendance across different departments.
This Power BI dashboard example can increase engagement between key stakeholders and drives critical conversations. Stakeholders of any business organization can increase their attendance and improve performance with the reports from this dashboard in different sectors.
Its discussion intensity tab offers critical insight such as mentions on social media, total reach, and much more. You can also find a chart that shows influencers by impact, volume, and amplification.
Users can view User’s Mentions in Sentiment analysis by Day, Hour, and Total mentions along with the percentage of positive, negative, and neutral statements.
Web sources show the channels from which the mentions emanated, including Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Photos, and Videos.
Businesses can utilize this Power BI dashboard example to view positive and negative mentions based explicitly on geolocation, including regions and cities.
You can find influencers broken down by volume and impact under the online influencer section based on the months of the year. It always shows a breakdown of their follower, whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral.
#5. Executive Insights Dashboard
Executive Insights Dashboard is shed light on business performance and its overall health. This dashboard is helpful for business organizations as it allows them to explore company-wide data-driven decision-making.
The dashboard allows various features; for instance, it shows the Abssight into trends and goals. Plus, the chart offers a predicted range for the future.
The chart also shows data about opportunities in business to help administrators target the most critical work. In addition, it provides crucial insight into relevant information about employees weekly.
With this data, business administrators can reach out to employees individually and increase their productivity.
#6. Team Performance Dashboard
Team Performance Dashboard highlights the performance level and sets targets for teams. Business leaders can share their targets with their teams regularly with the insight from this dashboard.
They can even evaluate how they score against their goal. Then the managers or business owners can find the areas for improvement that require more push, such as products and customers where sales teams can focus on.
This dashboard uses drill-through and bookmarks to organize content and shows you the targets and bonuses within reach. It allows users to fluently move between pages, drill down on Sales Reps, Products, and Customers, and switch between visuals using the toggle.
The dashboard also allows users to switch between different Map and Bar visuals using the toggle image to view non-profitable customers and more.
Besides, Team Performance Dashboard businesses can also compare performance and target cumulative variance for all customers. They can also open Customer Bookmark and drill with one click through customers.
This dashboard shows your average price, profit, and average margin within a location. They can also switch between Scatter and Matrix visuals using toggle and identify new opportunities with customers.
#7. Inventory Stock Analysis Dashboard
Inventory Stock Analysis Dashboard is another great Power BI dashboard example as it provides a clear view of the company’s inventory for the year 2018.AAs a result, companies, companies can track stock availability and replenish them at the right time.
This dashboard broadly categorizes into product categories by customer views and inventory, category selection, and quarters.
The product categories can be further classified into
Most Viewed
Least Viewed
Products Not Viewed
Businesses can also view their Total Sales in percentage and USD-based classification. Product Categories are classified by inventory into
In Stock
Running Out of Stock
Out of Stock
This Power BI dashboard offers valuable insights on inventory and divides the top five products into individual categories and segments. In terms of total sales and overall percentage.
It offers users a stock prediction section to select product subcategories and average daily sales, days out of stock, and replenishment days.
This can help you predict in advance the right time to replenish your stock and stock availability based on factors such as Fulfillment Cycle and MarkDown Variance.
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The Sales and Marketing sample contains a dashboard and report for a fictitious manufacturing company named VanArsdel Ltd. The VanArsdel Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) created this dashboard to keep an eye on the industry and the company’s market share, product volume, sales, and sentiment.
VanArsdel has many competitors, but is the market leader in its industry. The CMO wants to increase market share and discover growth opportunities. However, for unknown reasons, VanArsdel’s market share has started to decline, with significant dips in June.
This sample is part of a series that shows how you can use Power BI with business-oriented data, reports, and dashboards. It was created by obviEnce with real data, which has been anonymized. The data is available in several formats: in-product sample, .pbix Power BI Desktop file, or Excel workbook. See Samples for Power BI.
This tutorial explores the Sales and Marketing sample in the Power BI service. Because the report experience is similar in Power BI Desktop and in the service, you can also follow along by using the sample .pbix file in Power BI Desktop.
You don’t need a Power BI license to explore the samples in Power BI Desktop. If you don’t have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, you can save the sample to your My Workspace in the Power BI service.
Open the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com), sign in, and open the workspace where you want to save the sample.
If you don’t have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, you can save the sample to your My Workspace.
In the bottom-left corner, select Get data.
On the Get Data page that appears, select Samples.
Select Sales and Marketing Sample, then choose Connect.
Power BI imports the sample and then adds a new dashboard, report, and dataset to your current workspace.
Get the .pbix file for this sample
Alternatively, you can download the Sales and Marketing sample as a .pbix file, which is designed for use with Power BI Desktop.
Get the Excel workbook for this sample
If you want to view the data source for this sample, it’s also available as an Excel workbook. The workbook contains Power View sheets that you can view and modify. To see the raw data, enable the Data Analysis add-ins, and then select Power Pivot > Manage. To enable the Power View and Power Pivot add-ins, see Explore the Excel samples in Excel for details.
What is our dashboard telling us?
Let’s start our tour at the dashboard and look at the tiles the CMO has chosen to pin. We see information about our market share, sales, and sentiment. Data is broken down by region, time, and competition.
The number tiles along the left column show industry sales volume for the past year (50,000), market share (32.86%), sales volume (16,000), sentiment score (68), sentiment gap (4), and total units sold (1 million).
The top line chart (% Units Market Share vs. % Units Market Share Rolling 12 Months) shows how our market share fluctuates over time. Notice the large drop in June. Our rolling 12-month (R12M) share, which was increasing for a while, is now starting to stall.
Our biggest competitor is Aliqui, as evident in the middle column chart tile (Total Units YTD Variance %).
Most of our business is in the East and Central regions.
The line chart at the bottom (Total Units for 2014) shows that our dip in June isn’t seasonal; none of our competitors show the same trend.
The Total Units Overall and Total Units YTD tiles on the right show units sold, by segment and by region/manufacturer. The largest market segments for our industry are Productivity and Convenience.
Use Q&A to dig a little deeper
By using Q&A, you can discover additional details in the data.
Which segments drive our sales? Do they match the industry trend?
Select the Total Units Overall by Segment tile, which opens Q&A and populates it with the query, total units by segment.
At the end of the existing query, add: for VanArsdel. Q&A interprets the question and displays an updated chart with the answer. Notice that our product volume is mostly from the Convenience and Moderation segments.
Our share in the Moderation and Convenience categories is high; these segments are the ones where we compete.
Return to the dashboard by selecting the Sales and Marketing Sample from the left navigation bar.
What does total unit market share look like for category (versus region)?
Notice the Total Units YTD by Manufacturer, Region tile. What is the total unit market share by category?
Select the question field at the top of the dashboard and type the question, total units by manufacturer and category for 2014 as a treemap. Notice how the visualization updates as you type the question.
To compare the findings, pin the chart to your dashboard. Notice this interesting fact: In 2014, VanArsdel sold only products in the Urban category.
Return to the dashboard.
Sales and Marketing Sample report
Dashboards are an entry point into reports. If a tile was created from an underlying report, selecting that tile opens the report.
On our dashboard, the % Units Market Share R12M line in the % Units Market Share vs. % Units Market Share Rolling 12 Months chart shows that our market share is no longer increasing over time. It’s even declining a bit. And why do we have a large market share dip in June?
The report for the Sales and Marketing sample has four pages.
VanArsdel – Market Share page
Page one of the report focuses on VanArsdel’s market share.
On the dashboard, select the % Units Market Share vs. % Units Market Share Rolling 12 Months chart to open the VanArsdel – Market Share page of the Sales and Marketing Sample report.
Look at the Total Units by Month and isVanArsdel column chart at the bottom of the report. The black column represents VanArsdel (our products) and the green column is our competition. The drop in June 2014 that VanArsdel experienced was not experienced by the competition.
The Total Category Volume by Segment bar chart on the right is filtered to show VanArsdel’s top two segments. Take a look at how this filter was created:
a. Select the Total Category Volume by Segment chart.
b. Select the Filters pane on the right to expand it.
c. Under Visual level filters, notice that Segment is filtered to include only the Convenience and Moderation segments.
d. Modify the filter by selecting Segment to expand it, and then check Productivity to add that segment.
In the Total Units by Month and isVanArsdel chart, select Yes in the legend to cross-filter the page by VanArsdel. In the Total Category Volume by Segment chart, notice that we don’t compete in the Productivity segment.
Select the Yes again in the legend to remove the filter.
Look at the % Units Market Share and % Units Market Share R12M by Month line chart. It shows our monthly market share and rolling 12-month market shares. Rolling-months data helps to smooth out monthly fluctuations and shows the long-term trends. In the Total Category Volume by Segment bar chart, select Convenience, and then Moderation to see the fluctuation in market share for each segment. Notice that the Moderation segment shows much more fluctuation in market share.
We’re still looking to find out why our market share dipped so low in June. Next, let’s check the Sentiment Analysis page of the report.
YTD Category Trend Analysis page
Page two of the report focuses on the year-to-date category trend.
Notice the following details:
VanArsdel is the largest company in this category and its biggest competitors are Natura, Aliqui, and Pirium. We’ll keep our eyes on them.
Aliqui is growing, but product volume compared to us is still low.
The treemap shows VanArsdel in green. In the East region, customers prefer our competition, but in the Central region we’re doing okay. Our share in the East region is our lowest.
Geography has an impact on units sold. The East region is the dominant region for most manufacturers and VanArsdel has a strong presence in the Central region as well.
On the Total Units YTD Var % by Month and Manufacturer chart in the bottom right, notice that we have positive variance, which is a good sign. We’re doing better than last year, but so is our competitor, Aliqui.
Sentiment Analysis page
Page three of the report focuses on consumer sentiment.
Tweets, Facebook, blogs, and articles all contribute to consumer sentiment, which is shown in the two line charts on left side of the page. The VanArsdel – Sentiment by Month chart in the top-left corner shows that sentiment for our products was mostly neutral up until February. Then, a large drop started in February and bottomed out in June. What happened to cause this drop in sentiment?
Let’s look at external sources. In February, several articles and blog posts rated VanArsdel’s customer service as the worst in the industry. This bad press had a direct correlation to customer sentiment and sales. VanArsdel worked hard to improve customer service, and customers and the industry took note. In July, positive sentiment started to rise and then reached an all-time high in the 60s. This uptick in sentiment is reflected in the Total Units by Month charts on pages one and two of the report. Perhaps this partially explains our market share dips for June?
Sentiment gap might be another area to explore. Which districts have the highest sentiment gap, how can management capitalize on it, and how can they replicate it in other districts?
Growth Opportunities page
Page four of the report focuses on competitive product analysis.
Notice the following details:
The Total Units by Segment chart in the bottom-left shows all the category segments, except for VanArsdel’s two strongest segments. Select each of the segments in turn to identify potential expansion areas for VanArsdel.
Notice that the Extreme and Productivity segments are growing faster than others. However, we don’t compete in those segments; if we want to move into these segments, we can use our data to see which segments are popular in which regions. We can further investigate such questions as which regions are growing faster and who would be our biggest competitor in that segment.
Remember our market share dip in June? June is a significant month for the Productivity segment, a segment we don’t compete in at all. This detail could help explain our market share dip in June.
By filtering the visualizations by VanArsdel, by segment, by month, and by region, we can discover growth opportunities for VanArsdel.
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This tutorial will walk you through creating your Power BI News Dashboard, which visualizes news about any topic that might interest you. While most of us use Power BI to analyze our data, the ‘Get Data from Web’ functionality makes it just as easy to analyze external data.
The possibilities are endless, from following your favorite sports team to news about a competitor, information on tech topics, local news, etc.
Below is what the News Dashboard looks like for the topic ‘Power BI’.
The source data comes from News API (https://newsapi.org/). News API provides “breaking news headlines and articles from over 30 000 news sources and blogs”.
To have a preview of what we will build, you can download the finished template from here.
Register for an API key to retrieve the news articles
The API key is your login for accessing the news articles. News API proposes a plan called Developer, which includes a free API key. You can review their website to ensure that this is the right plan for you.
Head to https://newsapi.org/, then select Pricing at the top. If it applies to you, choose the Developer plan, which is the free plan.
After registering, you will receive an email with your API key.
With the API key, we are ready to start creating our News Dashboard!
Load the data for the Power BI News Dashboard
In Power BI, click on Get Data and choose Web.
In the menu that appears, choose Advanced and fill it in as below.
For the URL parts, the first line is the website address and never changes.
The second line is used for the search query. In the example, I search for Power BI, but you can search for anything you wish (local and global news, other tech topics, sports teams, companies, etc.). If your search phrase has more than one word, the words should be separated by ‘%20’.
The third and fourth lines are optional; they set the number of results received and the language of the articles. Unfortunately, news API limits the maximum results obtained to 100, so you need to create more queries to receive more results.
If you are interested in checking out all available options for the articles search, you can check the page here.
Once you click on ok, you will see the result of the data load.
Prepare the data for the Power BI News dashboard.
The result tells us that there are 891 articles for our search; however, only 100 are downloaded as this is the limit set by News API.
To open the articles, click on list.
Afterward, click on Convert to table.
When the prompt appears, choose ok.
Now choose the Expand button at the top right of Column 1, unselect ‘Use original column name as prefix’ and click ok.
And we finally see all of our articles!
There is one more column to expand for the source of our articles (the news site or blog site where the article is from). For that, repeat the same step as above by clicking at the top right of the source column.
Before leaving Query Editor, we need to change the format of the publishedAt column to Date/Time. This will allow us to use this information in the dashboard.
Right-click on publishedAt and choose Change Type, then Date/Time.
We are almost ready to create the visualizations.
Before that, we need to create two additional columns: one column with the Date only (instead of Date and Time as in the source data) and another column to correctly sort the dates.
Click on Modeling, then New Column.
Here are the two formulas:
publishedDate = FORMAT([publishedAt],"mmm-dd")
publishedDate order = FORMAT([publishedAt],"yyyymmdd")
After the two new columns are created, click on publishedDate and Sort it by publishedDate order.
We are now all ready to create the visualizations!
Create the visualizations for the Power BI News Dashboard
First visualization: timeframe slicer
The first element of the dashboard is a slicer for choosing the timeframe. This is a standard Power BI slicer with the measure publishedAt that we just created.
Second element: number of articles by date
The second element is a Power BI line chart, with publishedDate in Axis and count of title in Values.
Third visualization: Word Cloud
The third visualization is a Word Cloud, showing the most recurring words in the articles. The bigger the word is in the word cloud, the more recurring it is in the articles. The significant part of this visualization is that words can be selected, and the news articles are automatically filtered based on these words.
This is not a standard Power BI chart, so it should be imported from the marketplace. Click on the three dots at the bottom right of the visualizations, and choose ‘Import from marketplace’.
You find it by searching for Word Cloud, and you add with the button next to it.
Configure it by entering ‘description’ for Category and ‘name’ for Excludes.
At the same time, ensure that Stop Words is On. This removes all articles such as ‘The’, ‘A’ from the word cloud.
Final element: list of articles
Now we add the last visualization: the list of articles.
This is a table chart with multiple columns. It has two ‘special’ columns, which are the image column with the article image, and the url column with a link to the article.
To correctly show the image and the link, we need to configure these two columns.
Click on image URL, then go to Modeling and choose Data Category: Image URL.
For URL, do the same but choose Data Category: Web URL.
You are done. Congratulations on creating your own News Dashboard!
I hope you found this helpful.
https://nexumbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/News-Dashboard-final.png549980Nexumhttps://nexumbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/logo.pngNexum2021-10-03 21:23:052021-10-24 09:07:56Make your own News Dashboard in Power BI
The secret is out, and has been for a while: In order to remain competitive, businesses of all sizes, from startup to enterprise, need business intelligence (BI) and different types of dashboards.
Business intelligence has evolved into smart solutions that provide effective data management – from extracting, monitoring, analyzing, and deriving actionable insights needed to stay competitive on the market, to powerful visualizations created with a dashboard builder which enables business users to interact with data and drill into bits and pieces of information they might need, at any time, any place.
But what do you do with all this business intelligence? You can have the most robust BI infrastructure in place. However, if the underlying information isn’t easy to access, analyze, or understand, it is pointless. This is where the power of business dashboards comes into play. Dashboards often are the best way to gain insight into an organization and its various departments, operations, and performance. Well-built, focused dashboards easily serve up summaries and reports of the BI that’s most critical to the organization. Moreover, different types of dashboards will enable you to convey an improved message to your audience, organize your data more effectively, and boost business processes across the board.
That being said, in this post, we will explain what is a dashboard in business, the features of strategic, tactical, operational, and analytical dashboards, and expound on examples that these different types of dashboards can be used. Let’s get started.
What Is A Dashboard In Business?
A dashboard in business is a tool used to manage all the business information from a single point of access. It helps managers and employees to keep track of the company’s KPIs and utilizes business intelligence to help companies make data-driven decisions.
Let’s take an analogy to explain this notion further: A car dashboard instantaneously identifies and provides feedback regarding the status of the automobile: speed, servicing needs, tire pressure, fuel level, etc. Dashboards in business do the same thing, only much more. Through dashboards, organizations can quickly identify current and historical performance. Organizations can also further utilize the data to define metrics and set goals. By integrating these key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals into their dashboards, companies can proactively identify issues, minimize costs, and strive to exceed performance expectations. Of course, it is also important to choose the right KPI.
In the recent years, dashboards have been used and implemented by many different industries, from healthcare, HR, marketing, sales, logistics, or IT, all of which have experienced the importance of dashboard implementation as a way to reduce cost and increase the productiveness of their respected business. It doesn’t matter from which business you’re coming from or how big your company is, you always want effective results and clear actions to be taken after an issue is discovered.
Let’s explain that with a dashboard example:
The sales performance dashboard above is a one-stop shop for sales insights. The dashboard provides the perfect overview of the progress of the sales department by focusing on various sales KPIs: sales growth, sales targets, average revenue per unit (ARPU), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLV).
At a glance, sales managers can see whether or not their team is meeting their individual goals. Managers can also see if the team as a whole is reaching its goals. The value this brings to the business is significant. Once companies gain regular insights into their KPIs, they see deeper into their data and generate actionable insight.
This type of analysis is not feasible with traditional paper reports and spreadsheet tools. The traditional types of reporting don’t meet the requirements of today’s data management nor can they produce efficiency like an interactive dashboard where sets of data are presented in a complementary way. An effective dashboard combines information dynamically to measure performance and drive business strategy. That interactivity is indeed what drives a profitable result by visually depict important data that can be accessed by different departments. Cloud-based, real-time online data visualization software enables fast, data-driven action by decision-makers.
The digital age needs digital data. Now when you have plenty of information about dashboards, let’s take a closer look at each type, and how to choose the one you need in your daily operations or strategic goals.
Dashboard Types For Each Business Need
There is another important factor to a dashboard’s success, besides avoiding “data puke.” It is as simple as choosing the right type of dashboard.
As mentioned, the purpose of a dashboard is to drive action. In this data-driven world, many dashboard types are changing the way a successful business intelligence strategy is conducted. That means that although you can have a healthy approach to your business development, if you don’t communicate the right sets of data to the right people in your company, long-term success can be jeopardized and costly. This is why choosing the right type of dashboard can bring lasting and cost-effective results.
But that’s no easy task. With all the amount of data these days, and all the objectives and goals that managers need to achieve in a short timeframe, it’s not uncommon to be confused and overwhelmed with all the dashboards out there. First and foremost, you need to ask yourself the question of all questions:
What Problems Are You Trying To Solve?
To help you on your way to determine what kind of problems you need to solve, you should start with these inquiries: What is the main purpose of a dashboard? And, is your dashboard analytical or operational? Determining which overarching category your dashboard sits in is the first order of business.
Operational dashboards look at current performance related to your KPIs. They help organizations understand, in real-time, if their performance is on target. They are often used across various levels of an organization.
Analytical dashboards help organizations establish targets based on insights into historical data. They are often complex: utilizing complex models and what-if statements. Analytical dashboard ownership usually falls on business analysts/experts.
When discussing dashboard types, it is easy to get caught up in a game of semantics. Of course, there is overlap between the two genres and dashboard naming conventions are evolving with the field. The important thing is that you identify what questions you are trying to answer before you build a dashboard.
So What Types Of Dashboard Works Best For Your Business?
Now that we have separated the dashboards into two large categories, let’s dig deeper. There are 4 general subtypes of dashboards:
Strategic – focused on long-term strategies and high-level metrics
Operational – shows shorter time frames and operational processes.
Analytical – contains vast amounts of data created by analysts.
Tactical – used by mid-management to track performance.
Yes, with our current hierarchy you can have an operational-operational dashboard. We told you we could get into some dashboard semantics. Each of these dashboard types comes with different requirements for the level of summary, analytic capabilities, and user interfaces.
What Is A Strategic Dashboard?
A strategic dashboard is a reporting tool for monitoring the long-term company strategy with the help of critical success factors. They’re usually complex in their creation, provide an enterprise-wide impact to a business, and are mainly used by senior-level management.
Strategic dashboards are commonly used in a wide range of business types while aligning a company’s strategic goals. They track performance metrics against enterprise-wide strategic goals. As a result, these dashboards tend to summarize performance over set time frames: past month, quarter, or year. When the strategic dashboard is properly developed, designed, and implemented, it can effectively reduce the amount of time needed to accomplish a specific business key performance indicator, while reducing operational costs. To know what is a dashboard in strategic planning doing and why it’s important, it’s important to keep in mind that these dashboards can provide senior teams a clear picture of strategic issues, and therefore, grant them the opportunity to accomplish a specific course of action.
Although they can provide opportunities for specific departments’ operations and further analysis, strategic reports and dashboards are usually fairly high-level. As mentioned, senior members of a team can identify strategic concerns fairly quickly and provide comprehensive strategic reports with the analyzed data. The importance lies in analyzing management processes, using common qualitative and quantitative language, and identifying a specific system, which has to be incorporated into the dashboard so that every decision-maker understands the presented data.
Let’s see this through 5 strategic dashboard examples.
a) Management strategic dashboard
This management dashboard below is one of the best strategic dashboard examples that could easily be displayed in a board meeting. It isn’t cluttered, but it quickly tells a cohesive data story. The dashboard focuses on revenue in total as well as at the customer level plus the cost of acquiring new customers. The dashboard is set to a specific time frame and it includes significant KPIs: customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, and sales target.
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This dashboard answers the following: What is my customer base and revenue compared to this time last year? While addressing specific values, incorporating specific key performance indicators, and using a common qualitative and qualitative language, this dashboard represents the management board’s clear value and specific course of action, while using comparison metrics and analysis.
b) CMO strategic dashboard
Another example comes from the marketing department. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) often don’t have time to check numbers such as traffic or CTR of certain campaigns. But they do need to have a closer look at a more strategic level of marketing efforts, even cooperating with sales to reach the best possible marketing results a business can have, and, therefore, generate profit. This marketing dashboard shows these important strategic KPIs in a visual, informative, and straightforward way.
The strategic dashboard example above expounds on the cost of acquiring each customer, leads, MQL, and compares them to previous periods, and set targets. A CMO must have a birds-eye view of the strategic goals so that he/she can react promptly and keep the department’s results under control. An executive can immediately see where his/her targets are, which gives them the ability to drill down further into these marketing KPIs and see what can be improved in the overall marketing funnel.
To build this strategy dashboard, you don’t need to have extensive IT skills or advanced database management knowledge. The important part is that you understand your strategic goals, and the KPIs you need to achieve them. The rest is done by a simple drag-and-drop interface of a KPI software which enables you to cut the manual tasks of data management and dig faster into your data by interacting with each metric.
c) SaaS management dashboard
Our next example is another management dashboard but focusing on the executive level of a SaaS business. Here, managers get an overview of the three most important areas for any Software as a Service company: customers, revenue, and costs. Tracking these metrics closely and over time, allows you to get a birds-eye view into relevant metrics from past, present, and future performance in order to optimize processes and ensure your business stays profitable over time.
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Looking into this strategic dashboard more in detail starting with the left side, we see two line charts displaying relevant metrics related to customers. On the top chart, we see the paying customers, the lost ones, and the churn rate. All of them are displayed in a one-year period that enables you to see how each value has developed and if your strategies were successful and your targets were met. A similar situation we have in the bottom chart. This one displays the development of the CAC, ARPU, and CLTV. This way you can understand how much each of your customers is bringing to your business.
The right section of the dashboard displays important information about the Monthly Recurring Revenue. The MRR is one of the most important metrics to track for a SaaS business as it can give a notion of how much is the business growing. It does this by measuring the predictable revenue the company expects in a given month, and you calculate it by dividing the total MRR by the number of customers (contracts).
d) CFO dashboard for strategic planning
Chief financial officers need to keep a company’s strategy on track, monitor the financial performance closely, and react when there are deviations from strategic goals and objectives. But not only, as the finances of a company are affected also by non-direct factors such as employee and customer satisfaction. For example, if employees are not satisfied with their working environment, they can call in sick or leave the company which will cause financial bottlenecks. But let’s take a closer look at what kind of dashboards for strategy CFOs need.
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We will start the dashboard analysis with key metrics critical for strategic financial analytics optimization, expressed here both in dollars and percentages while simple gauge charts immediately put the focus on red and green colors. The visual interface will immediately show you that operating expenses are higher than expected, which you can use to dig deeper and identify the causes. On the other hand, we can see that metrics such as revenue, gross profit, EBIT, and net income are kept under control and, in fact, generate positive values. A quick overview of the targets shows exactly how much the gains increased, expressed in dollars.
By having all these numbers in a clear and concise format, each CFO can utilize the visual as a comprehensive financial report template, consolidate data from multiple touchpoints and automate this strategic plan dashboard for future use.
Let’s continue with more details on the right of the dashboard. The costs are visualized through a percentage breakdown depicting sales, general and admin, marketing, and other expenses. Here we can see that sales use up most of the costs, followed by general and admin. Maybe there is space to eliminate some costs but be careful not to cause the opposite effect.
Finally, employee and customer satisfaction levels are financial charts that are not directly related to the general financial performance but they can certainly affect it. Modern times require modern solutions, hence, CFOs need to have a close overview of other elements that can impact the company’s finances.
e) Sales KPI dashboard
Moving on to our next strategic dashboard template comes a powerful sales BI tool. The Sales KPI dashboard focuses on high-level sales metrics that c-level executives and managers need to closely monitor in order to ensure goals are being met.
First, we see that the dashboard displays 4 key metrics: the number of sales, revenue, profit, and cost, each of them is compared to a set target as well as the values of the last period, this way you get a quick glance into the performance of the month by just looking quickly at the charts. Next, the dashboard breaks down each of these metrics more in detail to extract conclusions and also analyze if the current strategies need additional adjustments. Getting a view into past data allows managers to understand where the numbers should be, and find efficient solutions to get there. The bottom line of a sales strategy should be to increase revenues and profits for the business, this can all be achieved by leveraging the power of the data in hand.
Now that we have illustrated the power of these strategic reports, it is time to take a closer look at our next types of dashboards, continuing with operational dashboards.
What Is An Operational Dashboard?
An operational dashboard is one of the types of dashboards used for monitoring and managing operations that have a shorter time horizon. Since they focus on tracking operational processes, they’re usually administrated by junior levels of management.
Their value in today’s digital age lies in the fact that businesses start to realize the importance of fast and correct data between operational teams and departments. While the unprecedented developments in the field of dashboard reporting and analysis have made operational undertakings quite simplified, operational managers can also greatly profit from using these kinds of dashboards, and visually and interactively point to a real-time data issue that has to be swiftly addressed.
These kinds of dashboards are arguably the most common ones. They are mostly used for monitoring and analyzing a company’s activities in a given business area. These dashboards are usually focused on alerting about business exceptions and are based on real-time data. Operational metrics dashboards usually end up in the hands of the subject matter experts. This often leads to more direct action, then further analysis. Because of this, operational dashboards often are more detailed than strategic dashboards. They can also provide operational reports with a more detailed view of specific data sets.
Operational dashboards help departments stay proactive and ahead of problems. For example, a manufacturing firm may use them to track products manufactured along with the number of defects, complaints, or returns. This helps in the manufacturing analytics processes – with a dashboard, any problematic changes would be highlighted in real-time. We will see this more in detail in one of our examples.
But let’s take a look at another marketing example. We have illustrated a strategy dashboard of a marketing department in our last example above, and now we will focus on an operations dashboard example, also for marketing purposes.
a) Marketing operational dashboard
The marketing performance dashboard above is one of our top operational dashboard examples. It shows the performance of 3 campaigns over the past 12 weeks. It provides important operational information and key performance indicators for the marketing team on cost per acquisition, the total number of clicks, total acquisitions gained, and the total amount spent in the specific campaign. Any significant changes would immediately alert the marketing team. Why is it useful? Because a fast-paced marketing department or agency can adjust their operational activities based on real-time data and teams don’t have to wait for extensive, traditional reports and analysis presented in a spreadsheet.
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We can see how each campaign performed and what kind of results brought in a set timeframe. This is extremely useful when each campaign needs to be optimized to deliver the best possible results, and often it’s done on a daily basis, especially in agencies. Operational reports need to be built fast, and this dashboard can help each campaign manager by having real-time, accurate data.
b) Manufacturing Production dashboard
As we mentioned before, an operational dashboard can be a perfect tool to track production. To put this into perspective let’s take a look at our manufacturing dashboard example. This visual tool gives a detailed overview of all aspects related to production, from the volume, quantity ordered, returned items, to machines’ performance. Getting this level of insights can help manufacturers to spot any potential issues or hidden trends that could harm production as well as find improvement opportunities to optimize key processes.
Going a bit more into detail about this operations dashboard, we first see the production volume and the quantity ordered, this enables you to understand what to expect in terms of production and machines usability on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis. Comparing the production volume with the quantity ordered also allows you to monitor if your production is being efficient and that you are not over or underperforming. Hand in hand with these metrics, comes the performance of the machines. Machines are the beating heart of any manufacturing company, by carefully monitoring the performance of each of them you can identify the ones that are most efficient, schedule maintenance, and be always aware of what assets you have available.
Last but not least, is one of the most costly issues for a manufacturing company: returned items. Tracking this metric in detail can tell you how efficient is your business at delivering what it is supposed to be delivered. A lower return rate means your clients are getting their orders right, while a higher rate means you are not providing the best service. A good way to keep this rate as low as possible is to take a deeper look at the reasons for the return and tackle the issues so they won’t keep happening.
c) Pick and pack operational dashboard for logistics
Our next example is a logistics dashboard tracking all aspects related to order processing. Better know as pick and pack, it is the process in which a worker finds an item from an order in the warehouse and puts it in a box, or another type of packaging, to be shipped to the customer. Tracking these metrics in detail allows businesses to optimize key processes and save costs while still ensuring a quality service. Let’s look into the dashboard more in detail.
This operational dashboard is divided into 4 main areas of the picking and packing process: financial, effectiveness, utilization, and quality. Each area is compared to a target of last month’s performance as a benchmark to improve. Paired to this, the dashboard displays the performance of 3 different lines of work on each area that is being covered. Tracking each line separately allows you to implement different strategies on each of them and later test which one was more efficient. It can also help you understand if an employee or team is underperforming and find training opportunities to improve their efficiency.
d) LinkedIn operations dashboard example
We continue our list of operations dashboard examples with LinkedIn. This social media network is critical for building business relationships, either on a profile level or company. With the number of users steadily growing and reaching more than 610 million members in 2020, LinkedIn should be on a higher priority for companies that want to reach decision-makers and business professionals. To effectively manage a company’s presence, companies can use an operational data dashboard that will solve multiple social media problems such as automation, customization of reports, and provide advanced analytical features. Let’s take a look at an operational dashboard design example specifically created for LinkedIn.
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To understand how your company is developing, managing your account in a shorter time frame is a must in the fast-paced social media world. Communicating with followers, monitoring the engagement rate and recent updates will ensure you stay present and reachable for any social messages that you receive or send. If you compare your results over time, you can identify trends, spot inefficiencies in your operational management, and create a social media report that will consolidate all LinkedIn-related communication.
In the example above, we can see the numbers of followers gained and the development on a weekly basis. It’s good to have an increment in the number of followers as your posts will have a greater chance to reach more people. The dashboard continues with metrics such as impressions, followers by industry, and engagement rate. It’s important to know where your audience is coming from since different industries require different content. The breakdown of the engagement rate through total engagement, likes, shares, and comments will let you know what kind of content works best so that you can reuse it in the future. Examine what happened if you see a certain spike and try to recreate the same strategy again.
The final part shows the CTR and the last 5 company updates. These metrics are critical to track since you will find out how many users actually click on your link and how your most recent updates behave. Modern BI reporting tools will ensure all these data is calculated automatically and delivered on a time frame that you set (for example daily or weekly), without the need to export numerous spreadsheets or work with other potential limitations.
c) Customer service operational metrics dashboard
One of our next operational dashboard examples focuses on customer service. By having all the important customer service KPIs on a single screen, the team can manage its operations much more efficiently. Let’s see this through a visual example.
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This type of dashboard expounds on the customer service team’s performance over a shorter timeframe, in this case, daily, with an additional monthly overview of the first, second, third call, and unresolved ones. We can see that the customer service dashboard is divided into 2 parts: the resolutions and the response time. Each day of the week gives an additional insight which helps teams to reduce the response time metric if they track it on a regular basis. That way a team can know if they need more staff or a better schedule during the days where response time is higher. That’s why it is important to keep the operations on track and keep an eye on the team’s performance on a daily level. For added value, you can check our article on the top call center KPIs and ensure the best possible customer service.
We have seen our operational dashboard examples focused on marketing and customer service, now we will continue with additional, different types of dashboards concentrated on the analytical processes of a company.
What Is An Analytical Dashboard?
An analytical dashboard is a type of dashboard that contains a vast amount of data created and used by analysts to provide support to executives. They supply a business with a comprehensive overview of data, with middle management being a crucial part of its usage.
Like mentioned earlier, the importance of an analytical dashboard lies within its impact on historical data usage, where analysts can identify trends, compare them with multiple variables and create predictions, and targets, which can be implemented in the business intelligence strategy of a company. They are often useful when complex categorized information is massive and broad, and need visualization to perform a clear analysis of generated data.
The analytical dashboard can also be found at the intersection of the strategic and operational dashboard. They consist of different modules that can bring a positive effect on the performance of a business if used correctly.
a) Financial performance dashboard
In the example below, the analysis of the financial dashboard focused on performance can help decision-makers to see how efficiently the company’s capital is being spent and to establish a specific operational task to structure future decisions better.
With the important financial KPIs such as return on assets, return on equity, working capital, and the overview of the balance sheet, a finance department has a clear picture of its capital structure. This analysis dashboard enables the department to, consequently, set specific operational activities to improve further.
b) Procurement cost dashboard
Another dashboard focused on costs but, in this case, specifically for the procurement department. As we know, procurement is found in most companies as a function that connects a company with its suppliers, contractors, freelancers, agencies, etc. It’s not only critical for industries such as manufacturing but service-oriented as well. To see the analytical perspective of a procurement department, let’s take a look at a visual example.
The procurement department handles large volumes of data and by analyzing the costs and purchase of the procurement cycle, analysts can present data that will provide a building block for different units in order to save invaluable time. A procurement dashboard as visualized above can serve as a tool to present data in a visual and straightforward manner.
The dashboard starts with a depiction of cost and savings-related metrics and the trends that are occurred in a specific time frame. The trend lines show you that, in fact, most of the indicators increased but the reason could be that the number of orders also increased. The cost reduction in the middle of the dashboard is divided into different product categories and, that way, management can identify if there is space for even more rationalization of procurement costs. The dashboard continues with the ROI, a procurement KPI that is, actually, calculated differently than the regular ROI. In this case, you need to divide the annual costs savings by the internal costs and express it as a ratio. Setting a target will help the management to immediately spot if the cost-related efforts were successful. In this case, the target was set at 10 so you can clearly see how it developed for different categories.
On the right side, we can see details on cost savings and avoidance, which is important to keep an eye on since it can ease the decision-making process for managers that want to avoid future costs by introducing specific measures such as better negotiation processes. Finally, the top 5 suppliers will show you where are your costs allocated in relation to the suppliers which management can use for further optimization.
This kind of analysis is essential since procurement departments usually gather data from multiple sources such as ERP, databases, or CSV files, e.g. In order to optimize the cost management and increase the overall positive results, an analytic dashboard such as this one can prove to be beneficial.
c) Healthcare analytical dashboard for patients
Our next analytical dashboard template is from the healthcare industry and it aims to monitor all aspects related to how satisfied are your patients with your facility and the service it provides. Covering aspects such as staff, treatment, waiting times, and safety, this dashboard will help you to assess your relationship with patients and ensure they are getting everything they need.
The healthcare dashboard starts by displaying a patient satisfaction score based on the answer to two questions related to how the hospital staff provides information to patients who need it. This is a valuable insight as communication is one of the key aspects of a good relationship with patients. If you make sure they are always clear about relevant information, you will enjoy a healthy satisfaction rate. Next, you get details on the waiting times of different activities such as lab test turnaround, time to see a doctor, to get treatment, and of arrival to bed. All these metrics are displayed in a gauge chart with colors that easily indicate if the score is bad, medium, or good. A good way to optimize this is to set target times and implement different measures to reach those targets, that way you will avoid infinite queues for your patients and more efficient care.
d) Analytical retail KPI dashboard
Another analytical dashboard example comes from the retail industry. It creates an analytical parallel between management and customer satisfaction since the supply chain can directly affect it. This comprehensive dashboard shows us an overview of important aspects of a retail business that enable analysts to identify trends and give management the support needed in business processes. Retail analytics made simple.
As we can see on the retail KPI dashboard above, some of the crucial metrics such as rate of return (also depicted by category), the total volume of sales, customer retention rate, and the number of new and returning customers through a set timeframe, can give us a bigger picture on the state of the retail business. These retail KPIs can show how good you are in keeping your customers and developing brand loyalty, the management can clearly see which aspects of the business need to be improved. If you keep your backorder rate as low as possible, customers won’t get frustrated and your overall numbers will perform well. It’s simple, keeping a customer happy will enable you to grow.
e) KPI Analytical dashboard for FMCG industry
Supply chain management is not an easy task, especially when the products at stake are from the fast-moving goods category. To help optimize several processes and ensure operational success is that this analytical dashboard was created.
Armed with KPIs related to deliveries, products sold, inventory, and stock, the FMCG dashboard gives an overview of all important aspects for the correct functioning of a fast-moving consumer goods business. By tracking the out-of-stock rate closely you get a picture of the status of your inventory and avoid stockouts that can affect sales. On the other hand, the products sold within freshness day and the average time to sell can tell you if there is a certain product that takes more time to sell so you might need to lower your stock and avoid throwing away products that are no longer fresh. By monitoring all these metrics on a regular basis you can stay one step ahead of any problems that might arise in your FMCG business.
Our next type of dashboard is focused on pure analytics that supports strategic initiatives: a tactical dashboard.
What Is A Tactical Dashboard?
A tactical dashboard is utilized in the analysis and monitoring of processes conducted by mid-level management, emphasizing the analysis. Then an organization effectively tracks the performance of a company’s goal and delivers analytic recommendations for future strategies.
Tactical dashboards are often the most analytical dashboards. They are great for monitoring the processes that support the organization’s strategic initiatives. Tactical dashboards help guide users through the decision process. They capitalize on the interactive nature of dashboards by providing users the ability to explore the data.
The detail level of a tactical dashboard falls between the strategic and operational dashboards. A tactical sales dashboard can track your sales target (actual revenue vs. forecasted revenue). It allows for various filters and segmentation, including region, sales manager, and product. An operational dashboard would alternately track sales of these specific products against their competitors at different times throughout the year. As they are a bit higher level, tactical dashboards also tend to include more data visualization than operational dashboards. Let’s see this through an example in project management.
a) IT project management dashboard
The example below shows a detailed overview of a project with specific timelines and the efficiency of the parties involved. You can define specific risks, see the overall progress, and average times of conducting specific tasks. After the project is finished, you can create a comprehensive IT report, evaluate the results, and make future projects more successful.
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The goal in every IT management is to increase efficiency, reduce the number of tickets, and deliver a successful project. By having the right tool in the form of an IT operations dashboard, a single screen can provide a project manager with all the data he/she needs to analyze all the important aspects of the project. While there are various types of project dashboards, this particular visual above is set to monitor project management efforts and alarm leaders if there are any anomalies within the process.
b) Energy Management tactical dashboard
A power plant provides energy to several sectors and industries, this leads to massive amounts of data being produced every day with hidden trends and improvement opportunities waiting to be untapped. This energy dashboard aims to do just that, by providing you with an overview of every relevant aspect for a correct management of your energy business: from the total sales to the consumption by sector, to the production costs per source type, you get the big picture of the different plants’ performance.
There are several insights that can be extracted from this analytical dashboard. With this powerful management tool, business executives can understand in which sectors their energy is being consumed the most and plan their production and delivery accordingly, see what percentage of their clients is interested in renewable energy, and invest in sustainable sources of power, as well as manage production costs, and monitor the number of power cuts to ensure the best quality of service while keeping costs at a minimum.
c) Human Resources talent management dashboard
For a long time now, one of the biggest challenges for HR departments no matter the business size has been to manage talents efficiently, and therefore, keeping them for longer periods. Our talent management dashboard allows for advanced HR analytics by monitoring metrics such as costs, hiring stats, turnover, and satisfaction rates, among others. By getting a detailed look at these values HR teams can achieve successful talent management and ensure a long talent lifecycle.
The analytical dashboard example starts with a quick overview of the total number of employees in the company, an average monthly salary, and vacancies for the first quarter of the year. Paired to this, we get other stats related to hiring such as the time to fill, the new hires, net training costs, and the costs per hire.
Next, the dashboard displays the talent turnover rate by department, and the percentage of laid-off employees by periods of labor in the company (6 months, 1 year, 2 years, and 5 years). Monitoring these metrics closely can help you find the reasons for certain trends and adjust your HR strategies accordingly.
Next, we get a really important metric, talent satisfaction, that aims to measure how happy your employees are with the company. In this case, the satisfaction levels are measured through the net promoter score of each group of employees based on the time they’ve been working at your organization. Here we can see that the most loyal employees are the ones that have been working for more than 5 years in the company. Finally, we get a graph that measures the trends by category where you can see how well employees develop their skills, knowledge, effectiveness, communication, and delivery. The important thing here is to focus on retaining the right talent and keeping the workforce satisfied to avoid high turnover rates and, subsequently, costs.
d) Social media dashboard
Since there are different types of business intelligence dashboards that cover various purposes and we have expounded on LinkedIn as a separate channel that needs to be monitored daily to keep companies in touch with their follower base and expand their reach, but now, in a tactical sense, a KPI scorecard can provide multiple benefits for managing social accounts and, consequently, ensure users have enough data to generate recommendations for future. To put this into perspective, we will show a business process dashboard focused on 4 main social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
The dashboard starts with Facebook as the biggest social media network in the world with, currently, more than 2.5 billion monthly users. In our example, we can see that the number of followers did not reach the set target but it did increase in comparison to the previous period. In this case, social media managers can dig deeper to understand why and if this Facebook KPI needs particular attention.
Other metrics and channels have the same structure and tactical approach: the analysis of targets with additional comparisons, which enable managers to dig deeper into the data and derive recommendations for the future.
e) Supply chain management tactical dashboard
When you create a tactical dashboard strategy, it is important to focus on the analytical and monitoring part of the process that gives a backbone for effective, data-driven decisions. Our next dashboard concentrates on the supply chain of a logistics company.
The supply chain metrics depicted in our example above show us how a data-driven supply chain should be monitored to ensure a healthy process for the company. Additional focus on inventory management will enable the company to have a clear overview of the logistics KPIs needed to stay competitive and avoid out-of-stock merchandise.
And not just that; you can monitor your inventory accuracy and act when you see this ratio drop. Discrepancies are normal but should be kept to a minimum. Other metrics such as the inventory-to-sales ratio and the inventory turnover show the financial stability of a company – you need to know the ratio between your sold items and items in stock. The turnover will then measure how many times per year your company sells its entire inventory, adding up the efficiency of your organization: you can then analyze it on an operational level (remember our operations dashboard examples?) and see how you answer the demand of your products, what kind of operational practices you have and how your shipment management works, for example.
By fully utilizing logistics analytics, you stand to reap great rewards in your logistics business, and, ultimately, manage to retain customers.
The Do’s & Don’ts For A Successful Business Dashboard Implementation
So, you are now sold on the power of dashboards. Before you run off to the dashboard printing presses, we mean data visualization software, let’s talk about using the right ways to build and use dashboards. It is always best to start off with the right plan and implement dashboard design principles that will take into account the most relevant data of your company. A successful dashboard implementation will:
Save time across an organization: IT, analysts, managers, C-suite, etc.
Save companies money by highlighting unnecessary operational costs
Provide insight into customer behavior
Effectively align strategy with tactics
Ensure a goal-driven and performance-based data culture
Encourages interactivity and analysis
An ineffective dashboard implementation doesn’t maximize these dashboard benefits and can quickly derail any data-driven culture. Have no fear! Read on to see how you can easily avoid dashboard fatigue at your organization.
There are 2 most important parameters to keep in mind when implementing a dashboard:
Don’t “data puke”
Choose the right type of dashboard
Avinash Kaushik, Co-Founder of Market Motive and Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google, has great insight into some of the ways that dashboards fail. He has also come up with some rules for creating powerful dashboards. Kaushik’s biggest, and most entertaining, rule is “don’t data puke.” It is important to remember that dashboards are not just reports. Make sure your dashboards include insights, recommendations for actions, and business impact. It also needs to deliver context! You don’t want executives and whoever else ends up with your dashboard making their own interpretations of the data. A dashboard should tell a clear enough data story where interpretation is unnecessary. Also remember, when it comes to KPIs, segments and your recommendations, make sure to cover the end-to-end acquisition, behavior, and outcomes.
Kaushik drives his rules home by stating “This will be controversial, but let me say it anyway. The primary purpose of a dashboard is not to inform, and it is not to educate. The primary purpose is to drive action!”
Now You Can Get To Dashboard Building!
By knowing the difference between the dashboard types, you can ensure you are presenting the right information to the right people, at the right time and using great data visualization types. While still stressing that you should always know what you are building, sometimes your strategic dashboards may seem a bit tactical, and the tactical dashboard a bit operational. Don’t worry about it. Self-service analytics give you the opportunity to best fit dashboards to your needs and create a dashboard strategy that will establish and develop a data-driven business environment.
https://nexumbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/cmo-marketing-dashboard.png613817Nexumhttps://nexumbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/logo.pngNexum2021-09-30 22:14:262021-10-04 22:35:10Make Sure You Know The Difference Between Strategic, Analytical, Operational And Tactical Dashboards
Power BI is Microsoft’s powerful analytics and reporting tool, enabling users to drill down into their data to gain deeper insights and make more informed decisions. This data is displayed in reports and dashboards, so users can easily see the metrics they need at a glance.
Within Power BI, there is a myriad of features available that can be used to make your reports more engaging and visually pleasing, as well as delivering all the information you need.
Within this blog post, we talk you through our top tips for designing sleek and eye-catching Power BI dashboards…
1. Consider your audience
When designing your dashboard, consider your audience – what information will help them to make successful decisions? How will the dashboard be used, and by who?
Remember, your dashboard is an overview of your reports and datasets. Your audience can drill down into the reports from your dashboard; therefore, you don’t need to put all the details into your dashboard.
You should also consider the device your readers will be viewing the dashboard from; if it is part of a large presentation on a big screen, you can include more content, but if viewed on tablets or desktops, a dashboard with fewer tiles will be easier to read.
2. Avoid over-complicating the dashboard
Dashboards provide a single place to view your key data at a glance. Therefore, having all the tiles on one screen is considered best practice and avoiding scroll bars. When editing your dashboard, consider what data is essential to be seen and remove data that is non-essential. This way, users can easily consume and act on the information displayed.
3. Use a theme
A theme can only be implemented within the desktop app, but it can be saved for future use once it has been set. A theme includes colors, background, fonts, visualizations, and the color your filter pane will appear in. As well as making your report more cohesive, it will save you time manually changing the elements.
4. Utilise full-screen mode
When presenting your dashboard, ensure your dashboard is displayed in full-screen mode to avoid distractions.
5. Think about page layout
Most people read from left to right so consider this when placing your data. Keep your most important information in the top left corner and display more detail as you move across and down the page.
6. Use the right visualization for the data
The visualizations you use should be easy to read and interpret; charts are good for numbers, whereas cards make your key data stand out. We asked our Technical Consultant and Power BI Expert, Nick Metcalfe, for his top tips when selecting and using visualizations:
Explore the visualizations – Use a variety of visualizations and explore the App source to access new visualizations to freshen up your reports
Format your visualizations – Decide on a format for your visualizations (background color, header color, fonts, and font sizes), and then stick with this across the dashboard for a uniform and professional look
Circular charts – Be aware of when to use pie, donut, or other circular charts. These types of visualizations are best if there are fewer than eight categories as it is harder to compare values in a circle in comparison to a bar or column chart
Be consistent with chart scale – Ensure you maintain consistency with chart scale on axes, chart dimensions, and the colors you use for values
Don’t mix your measures – Whether it’s timescales or quantities, don’t mix measures on the same scale
7. Use slicers
Though you can achieve the same functionality via the filter pane, adding slicers to the report can improve the report’s look and ease of use. Try different types of slicers, drop down, list, sliders, etc.
8. Utilise bookmarks
If your page is looking too full, try using bookmarks and buttons to show and hide visualizations. Again try to maintain a minimalistic design whilst still getting as much information as possible and can be particularly useful for adding slicers to reports.
9. Use tooltips
No matter how good your dashboard looks, some of the data can be meaningless without context. You can use ‘tooltips’ to quickly provide the necessary context and allow users to drill down further into the information with just one click.
We recommend keeping the dashboard more high-level and adding tooltips to provide additional detail without taking up space.
10. Experiment with different things
Despite the tips we have suggested, don’t be afraid to experiment and try different things. For example, try moving where the header is displayed, a test where you put slicers but implementing it on a small area first, play around with the page orientation, or change the layout of the visualizations – the possibilities are endless!
https://nexumbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Dashboard-4.png562999Nexumhttps://nexumbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/logo.pngNexum2021-09-25 22:11:332021-09-25 22:19:17Tips and Tricks for Designing Power BI Dashboards.
Data Visualization plays a pivotal role in Data Analysis as it helps all types of users build reports and dashboards to analyze data from multiple sources. One such BI (Business Intelligence) tool from Microsoft is Power BI. Power BI Dashboard Examples are some of the easiest and interactive tools for visualizing data.
Power BI Dashboard Examples aim to provide interactive visualizations and Business Intelligence capabilities with a simple UI to enable end-users to create their own reports and dashboards. In addition, as they are part of the Microsoft Power Platform, they can easily integrate with other Microsoft technologies and help you gain valuable and actionable insights from your customers.
In this article, you will be given a comprehensive overview of the Top 10 Best Power BI Dashboard Examples, along with their features.
Organizations use Power BI Dashboard Examples to analyze data in various domains. For example, a Sales Manager may use Power BI Dashboards to understand the performance of his Sales team. A Top-Level Executive may use it to visualize the profitability of the organization. A Digital Marketer may use it to understand the efficacy of his Social Media Campaigns.
You will now go through a curated set of Power BI Dashboard Examples used in the Sales, Marketing, and Finance domains. All the Dashboards mentioned below can be found in Data galleries at the Power BI community portal.
1) Customer Segmentation Dashboard
This dashboard is mainly used in business-to-business enterprises. It helps senior managers to visualize the revenue coming from individual customers and the profitability while serving those customers.
It displays the top performers and the bottom performers. It also provides information on what kind of product appeals to different customers and the sales share from each product segment. The dashboard template can be found here.
This dashboard helps Senior Management understand how the company is performing in Sales compared to the previous year. It also gives information about the performance of different product segments and what channels succeed in bringing the revenue. In addition, the dashboard allows one to view the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) both for revenue and profit. You can also check out Power BI KPI to know more.
This dashboard differs from the Sales Scorecard Dashboard because it tries to bring more information about products and the regions. It shows the revenue coming from different customer segments. It tabulates the units sold in each of the active regions, the profitability in each region, and the value of discounts offered.
This dashboard is a variation of the Sales Analysis Dashboard that focuses more on the Sales Channels. These types of Power BI Dashboard Examples are beneficial for organizations with an E-Commerce presence.
Presence in E-Commerce in many cases means that your products are sold on a large number of websites and geographies. This dashboard helps management to understand how each sales channel is doing compared to the previous year. The template is available here.
These Power BI Dashboard Examples are for organizations that market their products through mass emails. These dashboards display the proportion of emails that were delivered, clicked, and opened. The data for these dashboards generally comes from campaign management tools like Hubspot. They also provide how these indicators were changing over the relevant period.
This dashboard shows the effectiveness of various Marketing Campaigns and the performance of product segments and channels. This is a great tool for a Marketing Manager to measure the success of the various activities under him. The template can be found here.
This dashboard is meant for Digital Marketers who advertise products through website ads. It displays the success of the advertising campaigns through key indicators like Clicks, Click-Through Rate Percentage, etc. The template for this dashboard can be found here.
These types of Power BI Dashboard Examples depict the fundamental Financial Indicators of the organization. For example, finance Dashboards display revenue, Profit, Earnings before tax, Inventories, Securities, Accounts Payables, etc. The template can be found here.
This dashboard allows one to view the revenue and profitability from different geographies, customer segments, and product segments. In addition, it allows the analysts to go deep into each of these categories and analyze the Financial Performance Indicators. The template can be found here.
This dashboard is a great tool for executives to compare profit metrics across quarters. It allows users to select different quarters and dig deep into the numbers based on products and customers. The template can be found here.
The above Power BI Dashboard Examples give you an idea about the versatility Power BI offers for decision-makers.
Conclusion
This article gave a comprehensive list of the Top 10 Best Power BI Dashboard Examples and an introduction to Power BI and its importance to any organization. Overall, Power BI Dashboard Examples help companies better visualize their data to gain actionable insights from their customers.
To make the best use of these dashboards, organizations need relevant data, and there lies a big challenge. Even though Power BI supports most common databases, it does not handle cloud-based data sources outside the Microsoft ecosystem well.
For example, to use the Email Campaign Dashboard, you will need support for fetching data from Sources like Pardot or Hubspot. However, if you are constrained by the data source support or Power BI, you can consider a cloud-based ETL tool like Hevo that can bring data from almost any data source to PowerBI.
https://nexumbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Dashboard-3.png295527Nexumhttps://nexumbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/logo.pngNexum2021-09-19 04:08:162021-09-20 04:28:1710 Best Power BI Dashboard Examples in Sales Marketing and Financial
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