Top tips for creating better Power BI Dashboards

Power BI, the intelligence and reporting tool from Microsoft, has become a crucial app for many businesses around the world. Giving people powerful data visualisation capabilities. And allowing organisations to make more data driven decisions.

Data can be complex, and often overwhelming. With the wrong analytics, it is easy to arrive at the wrong conclusion. Power BI transforms that. Translating it into eye-catching graphs and easy-to-digest snippets. But to really get the most out of it, there are some key things you should be doing.

Here are five top tips to help you create the best Power BI Dashboards: 

1. Enable insight and data driven decision making

   Spending time making dashboards is great, but if it doesn't give your end users the right data, they're not worth making.
   
   Let’s say your Internal Comms team wanted some stats on the best performing SharePoint articles, but your dashboard shows how long people are spending on the pages or the many other stats you could pick out. It might look great, but does it give your teams what they really need?
   
   Consider your audience and identify the data that they need to help make informed decisions. With Power BI it is available from any location as a cloud-based reporting suite. Its beauty is that it can pull data from many sources in one centralised location. Its AI based segmentation can make high level insights available within seconds.
   
   This means you can easily publish a report to an Azure server, Microsoft application or online repository.
   
   

2. Tell a story, share success or spot weaknesses

   Creating charts and graphs from your data is useful. But to really engage people and show what that data means, you need to tell a story. And for different departments, different stories need to be told.
   
   “Data is awesome on its own,” says Harry Traynor, Consultant at Hable. “But you need to really tell a story with your data. And it’s often the hardest part of engaging people.”
   
   It is simple within Power BI to create a KPI dashboard per department, report on profitability or even target trajectory overviews.
   
   

3. Plan and prototype everything

   Planning your dashboard before you go into creating it not only ensures you’re getting the right information across. But helps to prevent overcomplication too.
   
   Whether that's mocking something up using MS Paint. Or even a traditional pen and paper. Working out what you really want and how to display it beforehand is critical.
   
   With prototypes you can test a concept or discover what is possible before presenting to stakeholders.
   
   

4. User experience is key

   You may have the most information-rich dashboard ever created, but if it’s hard to navigate, it won’t be used to its full potential.
   
   It’s worth remembering here that not everyone who accesses your dashboard will be a Power BI super user. Nor a data geek. So make it user friendly for all.
   
   - Colour is best friend, use colour to your advantage
   - Use slicers, cards and tiles to improve ease of use
   - Keep the design simple
   - Avoid over-informing
   - Consider accessibility needs
   
   

5. Integrate with other Microsoft 365 apps

   One of the best ways to get the most out of your Power BI dashboards is to integrate them with other apps within Microsoft 365.
   
   Add your Power BI dashboards directly into Teams channels for easy access. Embed live versions of your reports into PowerPoint to interact with the most up-to-date data seamlessly in your presentations. And share your data faster using Power BI in Outlook. The integration capabilities are endless!
   
   Similarly, you can pull data in from as many sources as required. To ensure you get the full picture. With data modelling tools you can ensure that datasets are grouped into relevant collections.