How to build a simple dashboard with Power BI

About this guide

Scenario

Bellows College is an educational organization with multiple buildings on campus. Campus visitors are currently recorded in paper journals. The information is not captured consistently, and there are no means to collect and analyze data about the visits across the entire campus.

Campus administration would like to modernize their visitor registration system where access to the buildings is controlled by security personnel and all visits are required to be pre-registered and recorded by their hosts.

In this lab, you will build a Power BI report and dashboard that visualizes data about campus visits.

High-Level Lab Steps

You will follow the below steps to design and create a Power BI dashboard:

• Create a report with various visualizations of the campus visits information
• Utilize a user natural language query to build additional visualizations

Things to consider before you begin:

• Who is the target audience of the report?
• How will the audience consume the report? Typical device? Location?
• Do you have sufficient data to visualize?
• What are the possible characteristics you can use to analyze data about the visits?

Tasks and Job Skills

Exercise 1: Create Power BI report
Objective: In this exercise, you will see how to create a Power BI report based on data in an Excel spreadsheet.

    Task 1: Prepare Power BI service
    Task 2: Create chart and time visualizations

Exercise 2: Create Power BI dashboard
Objective: In this exercise, you will see how to build a Power BI dashboard that lets you visualize and interact with your Power BI reports.

    Task 1: Create Power BI dashboard
    Task 2: Add visualizations using natural language

Career Connections

The guides in this series provide foundational Power Platform knowledge, empowering roles such as Business Analyst, Citizen Developer, and Entry-Level Consultant to enhance their job performance by leveraging the platform's capabilities.

As of 2025, average U.S. salaries range from $44,000 to $80,000 for entry-level Business Analysts and $52,000 to $101,000 with five years of experience, while Citizen Developers earn around $129,348 annually. Entry-Level Consultants make approximately $65,224, with experienced consultants at top firms earning significantly higher, starting at $112,000 for undergraduates and $192,000 for MBAs. Please note that these figures are approximate, derived from online sources, and can vary based on factors such as location, industry, qualifications, and company size.