Power BI is one of the most popular business intelligence tools out there. power bi dashboard examples It allows practitioners to create highly aesthetic, customizable visualizations and dashboards (with no coding skills required) and to share them directly with stakeholders.
A Microsoft tool, Power BI can especially be a great choice for Excel users because of its similar interface and deep integrations with Excel. Moreover, it provides practitioners with advanced features that allow them to transform and clean data, collaborate at scale, and set up granular access rights.
Despite all of these great features, Power BI provides the most value by allowing an at-a-glance view of all the metrics organizations and teams care about with its incredible dashboarding capabilities. In this article, we will demonstrate the power of Power BI by showing real-world examples of Power BI dashboards that cover a variety of topics.
If you're interested in Power BI vs Tableau and which one is right for you, check out our separate guide.
What Makes a Great Power BI Dashboard?
A Power BI Dashboard doesn’t only need to be aesthetic but also clear and useful. There are many dimensions by which you can evaluate a Power BI dashboard. In our article on the best practices for designing dashboards, we outline the best practices for building dashboards in Power BI (and any tool, as a matter of fact). Here are the key characteristics of a great Power BI dashboard:
Audience-Specific
Different dashboards have different audiences and different uses. Operational dashboards monitor real-time data of business operations and are used by operational teams (e.g., marketing teams), whereas strategic dashboards monitor long-term company OKRs and KPIs and are used by C-level executives. Great dashboards always consider the needs of the audience first.
Simple and decluttered
It’s easy to throw everything but the kitchen sink at a dashboard. Anyone creating dashboards needs to think deeply about the tradeoff between complexity and usefulness. As such, always ensure that dashboards provide the most useful information possible, without adding unnecessary clutter.
Use a grid layout
Using a grid layout not only helps you be more productive when creating dashboards but enables audiences to follow a seamless journey. According to Andy Cotgreave, Technical Evangelist at Tableau and co-author of the Big Book of Dashboards, humans are naturally geared to look at things from left to right and top to bottom. Using a grid layout helps your audience navigate dashboards.
Aesthetics matter
Dashboards should be, above all, useful. However, the aesthetics of a dashboard (or lack thereof) can seriously impact its adoption. As a general rule of thumb, always ensure you’re not using more than one font for your dashboard and that you’re using colors creatively to guide the audience in their consumption journey.
Fast load times matter a lot
Load time matters in the adoption of almost any digital product, and dashboards are no different. Even if a dashboard ticks all the boxes, it will barely be used if it has long wait times. A great way to minimize load times is to remove clutter, ensure data transformations are stored in views in databases, and balance between complex and simple visualizations.
Now that we have best practices lined up, here are top Power BI dashboard examples from verticals such as Sales, Finance, Healthcare, and more.
Power BI Sales Dashboard Examples
1. E-commerce Sales Dashboard
This interactive dashboard is designed to be used by online retailers and provide them with a high-level to a granular understanding of how different products are performing. It provides an overview of total sales, with the ability to showcase yearly, quarterly, and monthly growth rates. Moreover, it allows anyone to dig through the data and understand the top-performing products, locations, and more.
