Best Power BI Dashboard Tips and Tricks for 2022 and Beyond

This blog post is all about our collection of the 5 best and most useful Power BI Dashboard tips and tricks that we love to use and recommend to our clients.

It’s critical to stay on top of Microsoft Power BI web and app solutions as it is evolving drastically so that you won’t miss any new features and use them to their fullest potential. Our Power BI experts reveal these greatest strategies and approaches for developing Power BI dashboards in this article, which will serve you well beyond 2022 and keep you ahead of your market competition.

1. Keep It Minimalistic & Simple and Maintain a Straightforward Approach

Yes, it’s true. This can be a challenging barrier to overcome, but it is equally hard to ignore. People frequently attempt to use many features all at once and fail because they place too many items on a dashboard or do so in an unintuitive manner. This makes the dashboards look cluttered and take away the feeling of smoothness and user-friendliness from the platform.

Therefore, when building dashboards with Power BI, you must keep the end-users in consideration. They are not at all Power BI ninjas, so don’t expect them to locate all of the hidden features and click on all of the slicers on your dashboard. The experience of simply consuming the dashboard might be rather overwhelming for many of them. Consider the layout of a standard Power BI dashboard.

It’s difficult to tell whether you’re performing well or terrible as an end-user or as a manager when you get on this page. Is the performance satisfactory? How good is it? Is it a problem? How serious is it? Despite the fact that they contain a lot of information, slicers, and alternatives, there is nowhere to focus attention, and finding out how to access the details and insights is not intuitive. With each tile, a new set of questions emerges.

These are the two amazing characteristics of Power BI Dashboards;

For starters, you should identify two objectives.

• First and foremost, your dashboards must be easy to comprehend. As an end-user, you must comprehend what you’re looking at, the data categories, and everything else that is presented to you.
• Once you’ve grasped it, it must assist you in directing your attention and acting on it.

 

2. The Layout

First and the foremost thing that you never forget is that your Power BI dashboard must have a user-friendly layout. On the upper left of your dashboard, you should have all the primary KPIs. You must also provide some context around it in order for people to understand. In the picture above, with your revenue in October, you’re more or less on track; it looks like 0.6 percent, so you’re exactly on track. This is excellent. So, how did we get there?

The context which illustrates this is provided by the tiles around it. On a landing page, keep your information concise and clear, focusing on the most significant data categories – those that have had the biggest impact on your final result.

Read also: How Much Does Power BI Service Cost?

3. Tooltips

We believe in creating tooltips that will make your users simply go “wow.” Note: This is a common Power BI dashboard tip among both end-users and Power BI report creators. Firstly, you should create a separate page, which you can do by simply pressing the “+” icon at the bottom. In the given example, we gave the name “ToolTip” to the page. You then build a chart and place it on the website, making sure that the tooltip is not too large.

Go to “Page Information” when you’re designing the page. Turn on the tooltip option to make this a tooltip that will appear on another visual somewhere else. This implies that you may now utilize this page as a tooltip anywhere on your dashboard. Because Power BI switches the pages to suit the page by default, the image becomes extremely large. When developing tooltips, be careful to change the page view to the actual size to see how much space you actually have.

Because Power BI switches the pages to suit the page by default, the image becomes extremely large. When developing tooltips, be careful to hit the page view to the actual size to see how much space you actually have.

Keep the Numbers of Item Limited

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 essential information in the tooltip.

Since you don’t have much space, it’s important that you don’t cram too many elements onto this small chart. As a result, you should make sure that the tooltip only contains information that is essential.

Using Power BI’s top N feature is one of the finest methods to do this. For example, you may have a large number of variables, such as countries in this example. Some countries have made a significant contribution to your success. Then there are countries that are somewhat on the plan, so you don’t have to worry about them because there was no deviation. However, there are still several countries at the bottom that are intriguing since they have a large negative variance.

As a result, we’d like to provide only the most significant data, namely the countries with the maximum variance. You may activate the top/bottom N under categories, where you have various alternatives. We choose top + bottom N because we’re looking at variance, which means Power BI will automatically select a set number of countries with either negative or positive variance.

In the “Items” field, you can specify a number. So, this is where we calculate the absolute value. What’s even better is that the “others” parts automatically sum up everything else. Power BI automatically generates a condensed data set, resulting in a grand total that is the sum of all the constituents. This is quite significant. The best-performing and worst-performing countries will always be present.

Include A Tooltip In A Visual

Now that you have this small tooltip, you can just paste it into any visual. You can find the “Tooltip” area under the “Visualization” settings. By default, the “Page” field is set to “auto,” which results in a basic black tooltip that isn’t particularly useful because it merely provides you the info which you already see on the display. So all you have to do now is switch the field to the tooltip page we made before. This is the page name that we allowed to be used as a tooltip previously. 

Make Your Tool Tip Smarter

Now, if a business unit has negative deviance from the plan, you will want to figure out why. When you move your cursor over this variance, you’ll see a breakdown of the countries that contributed the most to the amount of variance in this business unit, whether positive or negative.

The following step is to figure out how you’ll carry out the engagement. If you want additional information, simply slide to the right and you’ll get more details, such as the numbers, absolute growth, and relative growth from the previous year.

However, this is still insufficient. You can dig into a full report on business units by clicking once only. You can now navigate from the basic landing page to a detailed report with just one click.

4. Dynamic Chart Titles

Of course, this complete report includes all of the company units. These business divisions are arranged so you can see all of the details in a hierarchical table that you can collapse and expand. End-users can grasp what they’re looking at – thanks to a dynamic title.

Since Power BI provides for extensive filtering, slicing, dicing, and cross-filtering, end-users frequently encounter issues because they are unaware of which filters are active at any given time. As a result, it’d be wonderful if you could just include dynamic chart titles that indicate the active filters.

5. Page Navigation

Of course, you now have a variety of options for presenting information about your business unit. You could, for instance, create a new view, such as tabbed page navigation. These are all native Power BI buttons with very basic page navigation but they all correspond to your organizational units’ report.

Slicers, on the other hand, allow you to simply tap and switch between several modes of operation. To change the appearance dynamically, these slicers use DAX methods. For instance, revenue, gross profit, trends, and so forth.

You have some form of navigation that sends you back to the homepage after you comprehend the issue. This is referred to as an overview detail design or two-layer master-detail pattern for Power BI dashboards, and it works rather well in our opinion. The landing page comes first, followed by the ability for users to navigate from the homepage to the comprehensive report pages. So, this is the kind of basic pattern we’re aiming for all the time.

So, these are some tips and tricks that we use and also recommend to our clients. The blog post highlights some of the key areas that you should consider while designing Power BI dashboards by keeping your end-user in mind. If you want a professional team of Power BI experts to design your Power BI dashboards or require any relevant guidance, then connect with the highly-skilled and competent team of Certified Power BI & SharePoint Experts at Code Creators Inc. Click here to connect.