Power BI – Introducing the Fundamental Building Blocks - Reports

The three main building blocks of Power BI are: dashboards, reports, and datasets.

A Power BI report is one or more pages of visualizations i.e. charts and graphs such as bar charts, pie charts (visualizations are also referred to as visuals). All the visualizations in a report come from a single dataset.

Reports can be created within Power BI, imported with dashboards that colleagues share with you, or can be created when you connect to datasets from Excel, Power BI Desktop, databases, SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and content packs.  For example, when you connect to an Excel workbook that contains Power View sheets, Power BI creates a report based on those sheets. And when you connect to a SaaS application, Power BI imports a pre-built report.

There are two modes for viewing and interacting with reports: Reading View and Editing View.  Only the person who created the report, co-owners, and those granted permission, have access to all the exploring, designing, building, and sharing capabilities under the Editing View for that report. Those they share the report with can explore and interact with the report using the Reading View.

In the navigation pane, your reports are listed under the Reports heading. Each listed report represents one or more pages of visualizations based on one of the underlying datasets. To open a report, simply select it. By default, the report opens in Reading View first. Just select Edit report to open it in Editing View (if you have the necessary permissions). If a shared dashboard has reports, you will NOT see the report listed in the navigation bar. Instead, open shared reports directly from the shared dashboard by selecting a dashboard tile (more on these later).

One report can be associated with multiple dashboards (tiles pinned from that one report can appear on multiple dashboards) and can be created using data from one dataset (the slight exception to this is that Power BI Desktop can combine more than one dataset into a single report and that report can be imported into Power BI).