TL;DR
- Power BI dashboards work best when they target a specific audience, minimize clutter, use a grid layout, and load fast
- This article covers nine real-world dashboards across three verticals: sales, finance, and healthcare
- Sales dashboards track revenue, product performance, and regional breakdowns
- Finance dashboards monitor stock markets, inflation, and organizational budgets
- Healthcare dashboards visualize patient data, diagnostic programs, and hospital operations
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 helps audiences follow a natural reading flow. 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.
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.
With those best practices in mind, here are nine Power BI dashboard examples across sales, finance, and healthcare. (Not sure whether you need a dashboard or a report? Check our dashboards vs reports guide.)
Power BI Sales Dashboard Examples
Sales are a classic area in which dashboards are very useful. Let's see three 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 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. Users can also dig into the data to identify top-performing products, locations, and more.
E-commerce sales dashboard. Source: Microsoft Fabric
2. Supermarket sales dashboard
This concise dashboard that allows an at-a-glance view of the financial performance of a supermarket chain in Kenya. It provides three reports, covering overall sales data with the ability to break it down by product category, customer demographics data, alongside staff costs and headcount data across different supermarket branches.
Supermarket sales dashboard. Source: Microsoft Fabric
3. Sales dashboard for AdventureWorks
This dashboard tracks the sales performance of a fictional bicycle manufacturer named AdventureWorks. It provides a great overview of total sales and growth over time with the ability to drill down by product category. It also includes year-over-year and month-over-month comparisons, plus a geographic map of sales by region.
AdventureWorks sales dashboard. Source: Microsoft Fabric
Power BI Finance Dashboard Examples
Finance dashboards help users track revenuse, expenses, market values, and much more, as we'll see below.
4. Global stock market dashboard
Stock market volatility creates a need for clear, filterable dashboards. This example tracks the top 200 companies by stock price performance during a period of significant market disruption. Combining simple visuals and great filtering abilities, it showcases the usefulness of Power BI dashboards in Finance.
Global stock market dashboard. Source: Microsoft Fabric
5. Inflation dashboard
“Inflation is a measure of the rate of rising prices of goods and services in an economy. If inflation is occurring, leading to higher prices for basic necessities such as food, it can have a negative impact on society.” — Investopedia
Inflation affects every economy, and tracking it across countries is a common use case for BI dashboards. This dashboard provides an overview of inflation across different countries, alongside other economic indicators such as import and export data, size of GDP, and more.
Inflation dashboard. Source: Microsoft Fabric
6. NCAA football financials dashboard
NCAA stands for National Collegiate Athletic Association and is an organization that manages student athletics in the United States and Canada. This dashboard highlights the NCAA's financial performance, with high-level overviews of total revenue, expenses, and profits. Viewers can filter the data by conference and by participating school.
NCAA football financials dashboard. Source: Microsoft Fabric
Power BI Healthcare Dashboard Examples
In healthcare, keeping an overview of the underlying data can help save lifes. Let's look at a couple examples.
7. COVID-19 dashboard
COVID-19 produced one of the largest public health datasets in history, making it a natural fit for dashboard analysis. This dashboard tracks the spread of COVID-19 across countries, recovery and mortality rates, and detailed country-by-country comparisons.
COVID-19 dashboard. Source: Microsoft Fabric
8. POC EID data dashboard
The Point-of-Care Early Infant Diagnosis (POC EID) data dashboard seeks to evaluate the impact of point-of-care early HIV diagnosis in infants. This project involved nine African states: Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Rwanda, Eswatini, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The dashboard provides the audience with a great overview of how point-of-care testing compares to conventional methods and can be used by doctors and public policy officials alike.
Early infant HIV diagnosis dashboard. Source: Microsoft Fabric
9. Hospital emergency response decision dashboard
The dashboard provides hospital administrators an excellent overview of current operations and bottlenecks in their hospital. It provides an overview of bed occupancy, discharges, and the availability of staff, alongside the supply of important safety materials and products. Alongside this overview, it provides the ability to drill through all of these particular metrics at greater detail.
Hospital emergency room decision dashboard. Source: Microsoft Fabric
Build Your Own Power BI Dashboards
These examples show what's possible with Power BI, but building dashboards yourself requires hands-on practice with data modeling, DAX formulas, and visualization design. Here are practical next steps to get started:
- Learn the fundamentals: Start with Introduction to Power BI to understand the interface, Power Query, and basic report building.
- Practice data modeling: Good dashboards depend on clean data models. The data modeling in Power BI tutorial covers star schemas and relationships.
- Master visualizations: Move beyond default charts with the Data Visualization in Power BI course, which covers conditional formatting, custom visuals, and design best practices.
- Explore AI features: Power BI now integrates with Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, which can generate DAX formulas and suggest visualizations from natural language prompts.
For teams looking to upskill across the organization, DataCamp for Business offers structured learning paths and progress tracking for Power BI and broader data skills. Request a demo to see how it works.
Final Thoughts
Power BI's real strength is turning raw data into clear, at-a-glance dashboards that anyone in an organization can read. The nine examples above cover just three verticals, but the same principles apply to HR analytics, marketing performance, supply chain tracking, and more.
If you want to build dashboards like these, the Data Analyst in Power BI career track covers everything from data preparation to report design. For more Power BI learning, check out these resources:
