Similar to the data warehouse bus matrix described in Chapter 1, Planning Power BI Projects, a report architecture diagram can be helpful for planning and communicating Power BI projects with both business and IT stakeholders. This diagram serves to maintain the scope and focus of individual reports. For example, certain business questions or entities (such as Customers, Products) can be assigned to dedicated reports and the individual pages of these reports can visualize these questions or entities at varying levels of detail.
Most commonly, a single report page will address the top priority of a report at a summary level. This page includes cards and/or KPI visuals at the top-left of the page and charts rather than tables or matrices that visualize these metrics at a high level. Additional report pages, usually 3-4 maximum, would be designed to provide a greater level of detail supporting the summary page. With this report structure, a user can naturally start their analysis from an intuitive and visually appealing summary page and then, if necessary, navigate to pages exposing greater levels of detail.
In the absence of a report architecture or diagram, reports can quickly become less user-friendly as many report pages are added that address unrelated business questions. Additionally, the lack of scope or focus for a report can lead to duplicated efforts with the same business question being visualized in multiple reports.
In the following basic example, four reports and one dashboard are planned for the German sales team:
In this sample, at least one visual from each of the four reports would be pinned as a tile on the Germany Sales and Margin dashboard. By default, this would link the reports to the dashboard such that a user could access the details of any of the four reports by clicking on a related dashboard tile. Visuals from a single report can be pinned as tiles to multiple dashboards. Additionally, a dashboard tile can be linked to a separate dashboard or to a separate report in the Power BI service. Chapter 7, Designing Power BI Dashboards and Architectures include additional details and examples of Power BI report and dashboard architectures.
The four reports and the dashboard from the preceding example could be included in a dedicated app workspace for the German sales team or within a broader workspace that supports multiple sales teams and related content (for example, marketing) in the organization. If a Power BI dataset is used as the source for Power BI reports, then consolidating reports and dashboards into a broader app workspace avoids the need to duplicate this dataset across other workspaces given the current dependency between Power BI Live connection reports and datasets within the same workspace. Information on app workspaces and content distribution via apps are provided in Chapter 8, Managing Application Workspaces and Content and Chapter 11, Creating Power BI Apps and Content Distribution. The following section describes Live connection reports to Power BI datasets published to the Power BI service.