Pinning tiles

Content on a dashboard is referred to as a tile. Tiles can be visuals from a report in the workspace, web content, images, text, video, or real-time streaming data. After creating a blank dashboard, it is possible to add any of these content types from the Edit menu by clicking Add a tile, except report visuals. To add a visual from an existing report, you need to first navigate to the report and select the Pin visual option that pops up after hovering the mouse over a visual, as shown in Figure 10.4:

Figure 10.4 – Pin button used to pin a visual to a dashboard

When visuals are pinned to a dashboard, they can have filters applied. Reports provide interactivity where users can filter or even select values from other visuals to cross-filter the display of information, which changes with the user’s selection. Dashboards, on the other hand, will provide a static representation of the data you want to use to tell the story. For example, you might have product sales data representing sales in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but for the dashboard used by the president of the United States subsidiary, you want to tell the story of product sales in the United States only. From the global sales report, you would apply the filter to the CountryRegion field to only show data from the United States. Once this filter has been applied (using a filter or a slicer visual), the visual with filtered data can then be pinned to the dashboard.

The Power BI service stores a cache of data to enable performant dashboards with various filters applied for the pinned visuals. More information on optimizing the cache of data used for dashboard tiles will be covered in the Optimizing dashboards section.

After clicking the Pin visual button, you’ll get the option to pin this visual to an existing dashboard or a new dashboard, as shown in Figure 10.5. Selecting the name of the existing dashboard will add this visual to the dashboard:

Figure 10.5 – Pin visual to dashboard selection

After the dashboard has been selected (or a new dashboard created) and the visual has been pinned, the notice shown in Figure 10.6 will appear in the top right-hand corner of the window. This lets you know that the pinning was successful and allows you to quickly go to the impacted dashboard or create a mobile layout for the dashboard. We will cover mobile layouts in detail in the next section:

Figure 10.6 – Notice that the visual has been pinned to the dashboard

Since it is possible to use themes when building reports, it’s possible that visuals being pinned to dashboard tiles will start with a theme. When you pin visuals from reports that use a theme to dashboards that use a theme, you’ll see this message asking for confirmation for the theming of the dashboard tile to either use the destination theme or the current theme, as shown in Figure 10.7:

Figure 10.7 – Selection of tile theming when pinning a visual

After visuals have been pinned to a dashboard, it’s important to review the dashboard and potentially adjust how the visuals or other elements have been pinned. If you open the dashboard you’ve created, you’ll be able to drag and drop the pinned tiles, as well as resizing them and adjusting things such as adding comments, adding functionality such as displaying the last refresh time, setting custom links, and changing the title and subtitles.

While most often, visuals will be pinned to dashboards, it is also possible to pin a whole report page to a dashboard. When this happens, the entire report becomes a tile in the dashboard and retains the live interactivity and cross-filtering capabilities of the report. Reports pinned to dashboards are not visible in the mobile layout and they may have performance implications; both of these topics will be covered in the next section as part of optimization.