Dashboards versus reports

Executives and high-level stakeholders require a holistic yet streamlined view of the top metrics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), established by their organization. While Power BI reports deliver a rich, self-service analytical experience, optionally at a very detailed level, Power BI dashboards provide an integrated and simplified consumption layer. From a technical architecture standpoint, Power BI dashboards are exclusive to the Power BI online service and are primarily composed of tiles representing visuals from one or many reports. Although each Power BI report is limited to a single source dataset, a dashboard's tiles can represent multiple datasets from highly disparate sources to help provide a 360 degree view on a single canvas.

To less experienced users and BI team members, the terms and capabilities associated with dashboards and reports can be misunderstood.

For example, the data-driven alert is exclusive to Power BI dashboards, while embedding...