Differences between Power BI Dashboard and Power BI Reports

Summary: Power BI allows creating rich and interactive Reports and view the business-critical information via Dashboards for better decision making. AI-driven augmented analytics will enable businesses to explore data and get useful insights via two essential services BI Dashboards and BI Reports. 

Power BI Analytics Services give businesses countless ways to connect with multiple data sources, filter data for making meaningless information, and represent this information interactively through dashboards and reports. Let’s comprehend the difference between Power BI Dashboards and Power BI Reports, but first, let’s understand what these services are all about.

Power BI Dashboards

Power BI Dashboards, also known as canvas, represent a story through visualizations on a screen size single page. It depicts only the most important business information as everything has to be displayed dynamically on one page. In simple words, it is an interactively designed, single page dashboard that displays critical elements to tell a story.

Visualizations that you can see on the dashboards are called tiles that are usually pinned to dashboards by report builders. All the information that tiles represent comes from the reports based on the data set. When you select a tile, it will take you to the data set or report used to create it. Dashboards represent the most business-critical information that helps in decision making.

Power BI Reports

Power BI Reports are the bunch of data sets with visual elements that represent different insights and findings from a particular set of data. Reports include either one or multiple pages of visualizations. Similar to BI dashboards, reports also display a crucial set of information to serve a different purpose.

Visualizations in reports are dynamic and get changed instantly as soon as the user modifies data. Reports are highly interactive, and you can customize them as per business requirements. Reports allow you to change the visualization type, apply filters, add, remove, or edit data for fetching detailed information.

How Dashboards are Different to Reports: In-depth Comparison

• While dashboards display the most critical information that helps businesses in decision making for efficient outcomes, reports represent data in a more detailed form via text, charts, graphs, numbers, tables, and other interactive components.
• Power BI Dashboard is a one-page representation of business-critical data that is collected and compiled from multiple reports. On the other side, Reports are a comprehensive collection of multiple facts and data sets.
• Dashboards allow for setting up alerts, whereas Reports don’t.
• The Dashboard is an enterprise-level business data view from where the user can navigate to reports. On the contrary, Reports are based on the datasets where all the dataset is accessible from multi-perspective view.
• A dashboard is designed in such a manner that it will refresh automatically if you keep it open for several hours. Whereas in a report, you need to refresh it manually if the data set gets modified.
• A dashboard is an interactive tool that displays crucial business data based on Reports. On the contrary, Reports are an independent collection of datasets or metrics with dynamic elements.
• Dashboard is a single-page review of business-critical information, whereas Reports represent an array of pages with data drill-up and drill-down capabilities in real-time.
• Power BI Dashboards are not accessible in Power BI Desktop; however, you can create and view Reports in Power BI Desktop.
• Users cannot subscribe to Dashboards, whereas they can subscribe to Reports for receiving emails.
• Pinning features in the Dashboard allows pinning to existing visualizations or tiles from one dashboard to another. However, Reports allow pinning visualizations to another report as well as dashboard.
• Dashboards are extensively used worldwide in the areas of technology across mobile and internet platforms, whereas Power BI Reports are widely used in sales and services domains.
• Dashboards provide an essential view of business data, whereas Reports can extensively analyze business statistics on a large scale.
• You cannot filter, modify, alter dashboards, whereas you can alter and change Reports on the basis of changing statistics. Any single change in reports will affect the tiles in dashboards.
• Visuals in Power BI Dashboard is non-customizable, while visualizations in Power BI Reports can be changed based on user roles and permissions.
• Business owners use power BI Dashboards in cumulative areas of decision making. Power BI Reports helps field professionals like business analysts, owners, sales, and marketing teams view important data needed to successfully perform a job.
• You can export Dashboards to a few file formats, whereas Reports can be exported to multiple file formats that make them more accessible.
• Dashboards allow business owners to make profit and loss decisions in real-time by displaying a more detailed KPIs version. On the other side, Power BI Reports gives a more comprehensive view of business data that analyzes business statistics based on the available facts and figures.
• Dashboards give insights into highly critical data, whereas Reports provide a broader insight into real-time business information.
• Simply put, the Power BI Dashboard is an interactive way to display business headlines or important data on one screen size page. A report can have one visual page or a bunch of pages loaded with visuals.
• Dashboards are dependent on reports, whereas reports are individual datasets with their own attributes. You can slice and dice a report to view how quickly it affects the dashboard.
• Users can set any dashboards as a featured dashboard; however, it’s not possible to set a report as a featured report.

It’s fairly important to know the key differences between the Power BI Dashboards and Power BI Reports before you opt for any of these Power BI reporting services for your business. These services are often considered inseparable; however, a comprehensive understanding of these services can help to apprehend the differences that exist typically on a large scale to make them entirely different solutions for businesses.