Exploratory vs explanatory, when do you build which dashboard and how?
summary
Designs use Power BI dashboards as either interactive investigator tools or static communicators. Exploratory dashboards are multi page, Power BI reports with filters, slicers, field parameters, drilldown and drillthrough, tooltips and often daily refresh, meant to find root causes; the workflow then extracts a single insight into an explanatory artifact. Explanatory dashboards are single‑moment snapshots or PDFs with concise conclusions and recommendations. The recommended build pattern is explore with a three-layer scorecard→analysis→detail model, then convert discovered insights into a polished explanatory view.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Exploratory vs explanatory dashboards
- 7:00Exploratory vs explanatory defined
- 12:13Exploratory dashboard traits
- 17:18Building explanatory dashboards
- 20:12Three-layer dashboard model
- 26:08Design principles for explanatory
- 30:08Consistent multi-page structure
- 33:10Simplicity and clarity
- 38:08Recap with examples
- 43:21Choosing dashboard type
- 45:29Q&A
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