Although any report visual can be pinned to a dashboard, only the visuals that either align with a corporate standard or that represent a critical insight or starting point should be represented on dashboards. Additionally, dense or relatively complex visuals, such as tables, matrices, and scatter charts should rarely be pinned to dashboards. Per the Global sales dashboard in the previous section, KPI visuals with built-in conditional formatting logic and supporting context are usually the best choices for dashboards.
For example, if a table or matrix is considered to be the most valuable visual within a report, a KPI or card visual could be created targeting, but summarizing, the same business question. The KPI or card visual would be more intuitive on the dashboard and single-click access to the underlying report with the detailed table or matrix could be retained. Additionally, the KPI or card visual would support a data-driven alert as well.
Additionally, given that dashboards are limited to a single page (one canvas), visuals that provide supporting context, such as the standard KPI and the Power KPI custom visuals, should generally be favored over simple cards and gauges. The additional details provided by these visuals may not be visible in small dashboard tiles but are very valuable if additional space is allocated to the tile and when tiles are accessed in focus mode.
In the following example, the Total Net Sales vS. Plan KPI dashboard tile at the Global level (top set of tiles) is accessed in focus mode:
In the preceding scenario, the user accessed focus mode by hovering over the top-right corner of the visual, clicking the More options command that appears, and then selecting Open in focus mode. For example, as perhaps the most important tile on the dashboard, the user could observe the (3.4%) miss to the sales plan (via the red down arrow KPI icon) and choose to open this tile in focus mode. Given the full pane of additional space provided by focus mode, the supporting metric lines of the Power KPI visual and the individual data points of those lines are exposed to the user.
The Power KPI visual in the preceding example automatically adjusts to the additional space of focus mode to display data labels for all months. The distinct line styles (solid, dotted, dot-dashed) of the actual net sales, sales plan, and prior year's sales measures are also more transparent to the user. Additionally, the three measures (net sales, sales plan, prior year sales) and the two variances (actual versus plan, actual versus prior year) are displayed as tooltips via hovering over the data points.
These additional data details, formatting options, and other capabilities are not available in the standard KPI visual and therefore, although the Power KPI visual requires additional configuration, it ultimately delivers more analytical value and serves to reduce the need for users to search for additional visuals and reports to resolve their questions. However, only the standard KPI, Card, and Gauge visuals are supported for data alerts so this could be a factor in choosing the standard KPI. Additional details on configuring data alerts in the Power BI service are included in Chapter 11, Creating Power BI Apps and Content Distribution.