Optimizing dashboards

Dashboards are a useful way to tell a story using data and visuals in Power BI but if they are not optimized to the screen they are being presented on or if the dashboard takes a long time to load, they lose their effectiveness. In this section, we’ll see how we can optimize dashboards for these scenarios to make them the most useful starting place for Power BI information consumers.

Configuring views of a dashboard

To recap, Power BI is an online service that allows organizations to see the most important information from anywhere. This is accomplished using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) website at https://www.powerbi.com as well as mobile apps for iOS and Android phones and tablets and Windows devices.

However, since these device screens can range from small hand-held sizes to very large, dashboards being created can be consumed optimally for every screen size. Large screen devices such as desktop web browsers and tablets will use the same layout, but mobile phones need an optimized dashboard layout to increase their usability due to the screen size.

To optimize a dashboard to a mobile screen, select Mobile layout from the Edit menu.

Figure 10.8 – Mobile layout under the Edit menu

You’ll now be taken to the Edit mobile layout screen, where you can arrange the order in which tiles will be shown when viewing the dashboard on a mobile device. Since most dashboards tend to have KPI visuals all in a row at the top of the default or web layout, the mobile layout allows you to pick the order in which they will be presented when viewing from the Power BI mobile apps.

While editing the mobile layout, you can reorder the tiles and or also unpin visuals from the mobile view. This is useful when you want a tile to be shown when viewing on the web but not shown when viewing on a mobile device.

Figure 10.9 – Edit mobile layout

To exit editing the mobile layout, simply select Web layout under the Mobile layout menu on the top right-hand side of the screen.

It is important to note that if report tiles are used (pinning an entire report page to a dashboard), then they will not be visible on the mobile layout or able to be consumed in the Power BI mobile app. This is due to how report tiles provide additional interactivity, as well as performance impact, which will be discussed in the next subsection.

Once the layout has been optimized for the devices used by the intended consumers, next, you need to make sure the performance is optimized.