Power BI Portal

The Power BI portal is a browser-based interface for users to access dashboards and reports hosted in Power BI repositories. This screen shot shows the Power BI portal where users can choose from a menu (left) and select from their lists of dashboards, reports, and data sets.

Dashboards hold a collection of reports, visualizations, and metrics (in the form of tiles). Users can edit dashboards to reorder, add, or remove items, and they can create new dashboards with elements from multiple sources to suit their requirements. In this example, a retail analysis dashboard (right) contains a series of performance metrics (top) and a collection of charts depicting sales performance (center) over time and by geographic region. IT departments typically create and deploy preconfigured team dashboards that contain company reports for users who are less familiar with Power BI.

Interactive features allow users to filter and drill down into any of the dashboard elements to analyze the underlying data further. Natural language capabilities (top center) allow users to ask questions about the dashboard that are interpreted by machine learning features of the service and will return answers in the form of new visualizations. For example, the question “show me a chart comparing this year’s sales with last year’s sales” would result in a visualization similar to the line chart in the middle of the example.