Power BI – Tips for Creating Professional Dashboards 

Microsoft has made it very easy to leverage Power BI, create a dashboard or report and publish it to SharePoint or share it with your colleagues for collaboration. What they haven’t done in the process is guide you on the best practices as far as implementation.

When first creating a dashboard there is the temptation to add as many complex visualizations as possible and cram them along with some nice images onto a dashboard.  The issue with this is that too much content can be overwhelming and often a simpler dashboard is much more effective.

Here are some tips to keep in mind to help create high quality professional dashboards and reports:

• Try to avoid scroll, the dashboard should fit on the page without scroll.
• Users should be able to glance at the dashboard and gain some insight in a matter of seconds.
• The performance of your dashboard is very important, users won’t wait 20 seconds for data to load on a visual.
• Simple Visuals such as Cards, Bar/Column Charts are often more effective than complex ones.
• Users are typically looking for data/numeric values on a dashboard, simply displaying key values on cards can be very effective.
• KPIs leveraging colors such as green for positive, red for negative are very clear and effective.
• Make sure the font size used is readable easily and consistent throughout.
• All visualizations should be aligned. Color choices are important and should be consistent as well.
• Light or White background colors enhance readability as opposed to dark colors, they are also easier to embed and print.
• If you leverage logos or images, make sure they aren’t taking up a large amount of valuable real estate.

Try to follow some of these tips and compare your new dashboards with older ones you created, hopefully you notice a more readable, effective dashboard.

If you need assistance with your Power BI implementation or Power BI Training, please feel free to give us a call at 212-997-9444 or email us at info@longieng.com