Most dashboard tiles are created in the Power BI service by pinning a visual, image, or shape from a report to a new or existing dashboard in the same app workspace. However, dashboard tiles can also be created by adding a tile directly from the dashboard itself and by pinning from an Excel Workbook or an SSRS report.
With a report open in the Power BI service, hovering over the top-right corner of a visual exposes the Pin visual icon, per the following image from the Global Reseller Sales report:
Report visuals can be pinned to dashboards from both the Reading view and the Editing view. The preceding image is from the Reading view, but clicking the Edit report button next to the File and View drop-downs menus opens the Editing view. Reports generally open by default in the Reading view, and the Editing view is only available to the user who created the report or members and admins of the app workspace for the report, such as AdWorks Enterprise Sales in this example.
The following URL from MS Docs provides a complete comparison of the functionality differences between the Reading view and Editing view for Power BI reports http://bit.ly/2HztVsY.
Once pinned to the dashboard, several options are available for configuring tiles depending on the type of tile and the content it contains. In the Global and Europe sales dashboards described in previous sections, for example, a subtitle was added to each tile (for example, France) and custom links were applied to allow direct navigation from the Global dashboard to the Europe dashboard.
The Power BI publisher for Excel add-in, available for Excel 2007 and later, allows users to pin Excel ranges and objects, such as pivot tables and charts, directly from Excel workbooks to dashboards. This add-in includes the ability to update pinned items and to connect to published datasets in the Power BI service to create pivot-table Excel reports. Additionally, ranges within Excel workbooks uploaded to the Power BI service can also be pinned to dashboards.
The details of creating SSRS and Excel-based dashboard tiles is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, several examples of these integrations were included in the Microsoft Power BI Cookbook (https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/microsoft-power-bi-cookbook). Additionally, the Power BI Report Server, which includes the full SQL Server Reporting Services functionality, is described in Chapter 10, Deploying the Power BI Report Server.
Dashboard tiles can be thought of as snapshots of a specific visual and filter context. When a visual is pinned from a report to a dashboard, the specific filter context (for example, slicers, page-level filters), visualization, and formatting at that time are captured by the dashboard. Subsequent changes to the report, such as a modified filter or a different visualization type, are not reflected by the dashboard tile. The dashboard tile will, however, continue to reflect the latest data refreshes of the underlying dataset. Additionally, by default, the dashboard tile will continue to be linked to the report from which the visual was pinned.
To maintain the synchronization between report visuals and dashboard tiles, changes to reports that impact the pinned visuals require the updated report visual to be pinned again. The existing dashboard tile, reflecting the original filter context and visualization, can be deleted. One exception to the snapshot behavior of dashboard tiles is live report pages, as described later in this chapter.