Building Interactive Reports and Dashboards - Textnotes

Building Interactive Reports and Dashboards

This module teaches learners how to design interactive reports in Power BI Desktop and dashboards in Power BI Service. Students will learn advanced features such as drill-through, bookmarks, slicer syncing, tooltips, and alerts. Hands-on exercises focus on creating multi-page reports, pinning visuals to dashboards, and enhancing interactivity for end users.

1. Multi-page Report Creation

Reports can have multiple pages to organize related visuals and analyses.

Example:

  1. Page 1: Sales Overview
  2. Page 2: Product Performance
  3. Page 3: Customer Analysis

2. Drill-through Functionality

Drill-through allows users to click on a data point to navigate to another page with detailed information.

Example:

  1. Click on a Region in the summary report → Drill-through to a page showing all orders in that region

3. Bookmarks for Navigation and Storytelling

Bookmarks capture the current state of a report page, including filters and visuals. Useful for storytelling and guided navigation.

Example:

  1. Create bookmarks for Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 sales views and navigate using buttons

4. Pinning Visuals and Creating Tiles in Dashboards

  1. Pin individual visuals or entire report pages to Power BI dashboards
  2. Tiles show key metrics at a glance and update automatically with data refresh

Example:

  1. Pin a Total Sales card and Top 5 Products chart to a company dashboard

5. Configuring Data Alerts

Alerts notify users when specific conditions are met, such as sales exceeding a target.

Example:

  1. Alert when Total Sales > $100,000 in a month

6. Syncing Slicers Across Pages

  1. Slicers can be synced to filter multiple pages simultaneously, providing a unified view of data.

Example:

  1. Region slicer synced across Sales Overview, Product Performance, and Customer Analysis pages

7. Report Page Tooltips for Additional Context

  1. Tooltips provide extra information when hovering over a visual
  2. Example:
  3. Hover on a bar in a sales chart → Show customer count, profit margin, and product details