Dashboards are single page canvases that contain visualizations called tiles. These tiles are visualizations that are pinned from reports, other dashboards, Q&A displays, or other sources such as quick insights. Single visuals or entire report pages can be pinned.

At first, you may be confused with regard to the purpose of dashboards versus reports since both are essentially a collection of visualizations. The most important difference is that reports can only contain visuals based upon a single dataset, while Power BI dashboards can contain visuals from many different sources. In addition, dashboards have exclusive features, such as setting alerts, setting a featured dashboard, control over navigation, and the ability to view real-time data streams.

Because dashboards can contain information from one or more reports and one or more data sources, dashboards allow end users to create a single, customized view of all of the information within an organization that is most important to them.