A Dashboard in Power BI is a single page that is often referred to as a canvas, that uses visuals to tell a story. A Power BI Dashboard is limited to one page. Because of this, you only want to put the most important elements into your dashboard so it tells them most appropriate story from your data. Dashboards are basically an array of pinned tiles that are pinned from reports to your dashboard. You can include tiles from multiple reports, which means you can get around the limitation of one dataset per report. So if you want to use multiple datasets, dashboards are a good solution to make a single meaningful page that shows you all of your data.

Like Power BI Reports, you can access dashboards from a mobile device using the Power BI App as well as view them on the web. There are some key differences with Power BI Dashboards compared to Power BI Reports that you should be aware of. Dashboards are limited to one page, whereas reports have multiple pages. You cannot filter or slice a dashboard like you can on a report. Your dashboard tiles will be static. Your data will change but you cannot change filters on the fly.

You can set alerts from your dashboards and also set up a featured dashboard so it stands out. This functionality is not available in reports. And you will not be able to export data in the underlying tables when you're using Power BI dashboards. If you want to export data, this must be done from a report page, not the dashboard page. So another crucial thing we need to cover is licensing.

To use Power BI Dashboard, you will need to have a subscription. You can either use a Pro or Premium Power BI subscription. Some of the Microsoft 365 subscriptions include a license for Power BI Pro, so depending on what license you have, you may already have the subscriptions available. You will not be able to use Power BI Dashboards on a free Power BI subscription.