Somebody wise once said simplicity is the shortest path to a solution. If you’ve ever used Power BI, you’ll know exactly what they meant. With its straightforward user interface, Microsoft’s premier business analytics service allows just about anyone to navigate around easily. We’ve discussed it in quite some detail, from how workspaces function to what models are available for public use.
This blog post focuses on what Power BI is best known for: dashboards and reports. Both will simplify your life, provide clarity and improve your business decision-making. Still, there are some differences in how and when you should use them. To find out what they are, keep reading.
Microsoft defines a Power BI dashboard as “a single page, often called a canvas, that tells a story through visualizations. Because it’s limited to one page, a well-designed dashboard contains only the story’s highlights, and readers can view related reports for the details.”
As it says, it provides the highlights or important information and data from stories or reports in a visual form. In plain language, it is a glimpse, and a sneak peek – the trailer you see before a movie—a sampling menu from a larger buffet.
With that out of the way, let’s look at some of Power BI dashboards’ most frequent uses.
As we have seen, Power BI dashboards are a very powerful tool that can be used whenever a data summary is needed quickly and concisely. At the beginning of a report presentation, they provide a content summary to spark the interest of a user or an audience.
Ultimately, they round off data from multiple reports to provide the main conclusions and points of interest.
Thus, the uses of dashboards are limited only by the need and situation at hand.
To hear from Microsoft again: “A Power BI report is a multi-perspective view of a dataset, with visuals representing different findings and insights from that dataset. A report can have a single visual or pages full of visuals.”
While a dashboard may comprise visuals from several different reports, a report is a detailed breakdown of a single dataset.
A dashboard may present a teaser or one particular facet of a dataset, whereas a report provides the entire picture and, thus, a more robust view.
As for the uses of a Power BI report, it is applicable and fit for use wherever a report needs to be presented in a visual or audio setting.
Since most reports and datasets are now digitally interacted with, a Power BI report can work to great effect even outside of those settings. Due to its ease of use, it allows for greater understanding and absorption of the major elements of a dataset.
As we mentioned in the introduction, both Power BI dashboards and reports will simplify your life; they will help you make decisions and inform others with relevant data. But, there are differences between Power BI dashboards and Power BI reports. Here are the most important ones:
At this point, you must have realized that you cannot separate Power BI dashboards and reports. They’re the yin and yang of Microsoft’s business intelligence: they feed each other and work in synergistic harmony.
Both are powerful, versatile, and robust tools that can give a comprehensive wider picture or a comprehensive look at the minutiae and finer details
A good IT manager or business user can best leverage the tools at their disposal according to the needs and demands of the situation. Shunning one for the other would be a poor and ill-thought approach.
No matter how useful they are in daily work, Power BI’s visualization capabilities can compromise the security of your sensitive data if accessed by the wrong set of eyes.
With Syskit Point’s Power BI inventory and permission reports, IT admins get instant and accurate insights into facts, such as which data is exposed to whom, together with the intelligence of published reports and the corresponding time and data sources.
Book a no-obligation demo to discover how you can stay in full control of your Microsoft 365 environment with Syskit Point and ensure powerful insights into your Power BI ecosystem.