Report view in Power BI Desktop: Create reports

If you work with Power BI, you know how easy it is to create reports that provide dynamic perspectives and insights into your data. Power BI also has more advanced features in Power BI Desktop. By using Power BI Desktop, you can create advanced queries, mashup data from multiple sources, create relationships between tables, and more.

Power BI Desktop includes a Report view, where you can create any number of report pages with visualizations. Report view in Power BI Desktop provides a similar design experience to the report's editing view in the Power BI service. You can move visualizations around, copy and paste, merge, and so on.

By using Power BI Desktop, you can work with your queries and model your data to make sure your data supports the best insights in your reports. You can then save your Power BI Desktop file wherever you like, whether it's your local drive or to the cloud.

Get started with Report view

When you first load data in Power BI Desktop, you see the Report view with a blank canvas, with links to help you add data to your report.

You can switch between Report, Data, and Model views by selecting the icons in the left-hand navigation pane:

Once you add data, you can add fields to a new visualization in the canvas.

To change the type of visualization, select it on the canvas, and then select a new type in Visualizations.

Tip

Be sure to experiment with different visualization types. It's important your visualization convey information in your data clearly.

A report has at least one blank page to start. Pages appear in the navigation area at the bottom of the Report view. You can add all sorts of visualizations to a page, but it's important not to overdo it. Too many visualizations on a page make it look busy and difficult to find the right information. You can add new pages to your report. Just select New page from the Insert tab on the ribbon, and then select Blank page.

You can also select the + icon next to the pages in the navigation area below the canvas to create a new page.

To delete a page, select the x on the page's tab at the bottom of the Report view.

Note

You can't pin reports and visualizations to a dashboard from Power BI Desktop. To do that, you need to publish to your Power BI site. For more information, see Publish semantic models and reports from Power BI Desktop.

Copy and paste visuals between reports

You can easily take a visual from one Power BI Desktop report and paste it into another report. Use the Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut to copy your report visual. In the other Power BI Desktop report, use Ctrl+V to paste the visual into the other report. You can copy one visual at a time, or all visuals on a page, then paste into the destination Power BI Desktop report.

The ability to copy and paste visuals is useful for people who build and update multiple reports frequently. When you copy between files, the process carries forward settings and formatting that you explicitly set in the formatting pane. Visual elements that rely on a theme or the default settings automatically update to match the theme of the destination report. When you get a visual formatted and appearing the way you want, you can copy and paste that visual into new reports and preserve your work.

If the fields in your model are different, you see an error on the visual and a warning about which fields don't exist. The error is similar to the experience you see when you delete a field in the model that a visual is using.

Hide report pages

When you create a report, you can also hide pages from the report. This approach might be useful if you need to create underlying data or visuals in a report, but you don't want those pages to be visible to others. Hiding pages can be useful when you create tables or supporting visuals that are used in other report pages. Many other creative reasons exist for creating a report page and then hiding it from a report you want to publish.

Hiding a report page is easy. Right-click the report page tab, and select Hide from the menu.

Keep a few considerations in mind when hiding a report page:

• You can still see a hidden report view when in Power BI Desktop, even though the page shows a hidden page icon. In the following image, the Overview page is hidden.

  

• You can't see a hidden report page when you view the report in the Power BI service in Reading view, but you can see it in Edit view.

• If you save the report while looking at the hidden page, and then you publish it to the Power BI service, that page is the first one your report readers see.

• Hiding a report page is not a security measure. Users can still access the page, and its content is still accessible through drillthrough and other methods.

• No view-mode navigation arrows appear when a page is hidden in View mode.