Difference between "pinning live" from a report and pinning a tile from a dashboard

[tschmidt87]

Hi, i just want to provide some quick feedback on the understated / unknown importance of pinning a visual from within a "report" section on Power BI vs pinning a visual from within the "dashboard" section.

To me, the second option was completely unknown to me or rather i thought the two were identical. However, it turns out there are many differences between the two ways to pin a visual live to a dashboard. Especially since the Power BI Service update where you can set up data alerts. When pinning from a report, you will not actually see the bell icon for alerts, or any of the other options (like "export).

I took me about two weeks to figure out that the data alert will only work if i pin something from the DASHBOARD, and not from the REPORT. This was not too clear in any of the documentation or even the forum posts about the matter.

In fact, it's quite counter-intuitive to first have to "pin live" a page to the dashboard, and then go into the pinned page and pin it again? Plus, if you have multiple visuals within the report page, how do you even pin only one of them to the dashboard? 

To me, the whole pinning feature is quite confusing and i don't understand the underlying logic behind it, from a UX point of view.

[mihart]

hi @tschmidt87,

I wrote those pages and I'm sorry you're finding them confusing.  Please answer Eno's questions and I'll use your responses to update the docs.

Thanks for the feedback,

Michele

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@tschmidt87 Some of your description is confusing... let me share what I know.

First, you can only use alerts on cards, KPIs or gauges with numeric values. These visuals are directly pinned from the report to the dashboard, there is no need to jump through hoops...

What it seems like you describe is using the pin live page feature, then clicking into the report... which is the report. Because you can't pin tiles from a Live Page on the dashboard. It is in itself, a dashboard element.

You can pin tiles from one dashboard to another, but it still doesn't change the ability of what the tile can do, from my understanding.

To simplify.

You can pin visuals to a dashboard.

     - These tiles can have alerts set if it falls into the approved visual above

    - These visuals can be re-directed to other reports or URL, and have the most options for additional config

You can pin the live page to a dashboard.

     - The only customization is to add refresh time or change title.

You can pin tiles from one dashboard to another dashboard and they retain the same functionality above.

If there is something i'm missing, please let me know, but I can't quite follow the path as you outline it.