Power BI visual guide
Decision Board turns entity-level data into an explainable, prioritized queue. Choose who owns the current state, prepare measures that return the intended value, and then bind only the fields required by that mode.
Binding a field to State activates Bound State for the entire visual. Leave State empty when you want Decision Board to calculate states from Signal rules.
Model-owned state
Use this when your warehouse, semantic model, or workflow already assigns the authoritative state. Decision Board presents and prioritizes that decision without reevaluating it.
Visual-owned state
Use this when you want report authors to define transparent thresholds for one to seven numeric Signals. Decision Board evaluates every active rule and uses the most severe result.
Bind a stable business key or label to Entity. Put supporting text in Secondary Label and an optional section value in Grouping.
Add the model-owned current state to State. In Format → Evaluation, map your values to Critical, Action Needed, Watch, and Healthy.
Add Previous State for transition classification and State Reason for a model-authored explanation. Previous State never substitutes for a missing current State.
Add optional Signal and Target measures for context. Impact orders equally urgent entities but never changes their state.
A blank State becomes Needs Data. An unrecognized value becomes Unmapped State. Decision Board never presents either condition as Healthy.
Settings that apply only to Calculated Rules—such as hysteresis and the debug trace—are disabled while State is bound. Hover a grayed setting to see why. The Metric display card also notes when sparklines and deltas are waiting on a Period field; those work in both modes once history is available.
Binding State activates Bound State mode. Calculated Rules must receive Entity and Signal measures without a bound State field.
Signals must be numeric measures. Add Period only when you need sparklines, deltas, previous-period rules, rolling averages, persistence, or calculated transitions.
Open Format → Signal rules, choose whether higher or lower is better, select a comparison method, and enable at least one Critical, Action Needed, or Watch threshold.
Turn Contributes to state off for measures that should be displayed but should not affect the decision.
With the Decision Board time-series sample, bind Entity, Period, and a Customer Satisfaction measure. Configure Customer Satisfaction as Higher is better with Current value thresholds of Critical below 50, Action Needed below 65, and Watch below 85. This produces all four evaluated states and meaningful transitions in the supplied data.
Prefer to explore first? The sample report shows a fully configured board with no setup required.
Download the sample report (.pbix)Signals, Targets, and Impact are measure roles. Power BI therefore asks how numeric columns should be summarized. Choose the calculation that represents the business meaning—do not accept Count unless the metric itself is a row count.
For a snapshot table, or a time-series table with exactly one row per Entity and Period, SELECTEDVALUE preserves the intended scalar and returns blank when the context is ambiguous.
DB Health Score =
SELECTEDVALUE('Account Health'[HealthScore])
DB Revenue Target =
SELECTEDVALUE('Account Health'[RevenueTarget])Use a measure that deliberately aggregates the fact rows in the current Entity and Period context. The correct aggregation depends on the metric.
DB Revenue =
SUM('Sales'[Revenue])
DB Satisfaction =
AVERAGE('Survey Results'[Score])
DB Impact =
SUM('Open Exposure'[Amount])| Situation | Recommended approach |
|---|---|
| One scalar value at the visual grain | SELECTEDVALUE |
| Additive amount such as revenue or exposure | SUM |
| Score or rate across several records | AVERAGE or a weighted business measure |
| Entity-level target repeated across fact rows | SELECTEDVALUE or MAX when repetition is intentional |
| Actual record count is the KPI | COUNTROWS or a distinct-count measure |
Targets pair with Signals by position. If Signals contains Health Score followed by Revenue, Targets must contain Health Target followed by Revenue Target.
| Field well | Bound State | Calculated Rules | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entity | Required | Required | Unique item to prioritize |
| Signals | Optional context | At least one | Numeric KPI measures |
| Period | Optional | Optional | History, trends, and relative rules |
| Targets | Optional context | Optional | Ordinally paired target measures |
| State | Required | Leave empty | Authoritative current state |
| Previous State | Optional | Leave empty | Bound-state transition context |
| State Reason | Optional | Leave empty | Model-authored explanation |
| Impact | Optional | Optional | Tie-breaker within equally urgent states |
| Secondary Label | Optional | Optional | Supporting entity context |
| Entity Image | Optional | Optional | Entity image URL or supported image data |
| Grouping | Optional | Optional | One-level section grouping |
Turning on Show sparklines only enables rendering when history exists. Bind Period and provide at least two populated values per Entity and Signal. A current-state snapshot without Period correctly shows values and Targets without a sparkline.
Format → Metric display → Sparkline size offers three sizes. Compact suits dense boards with many Signals or entities. Standard is the default. Prominent widens the Signal tiles and makes trend shape and the threshold line easiest to read.
When a Signal has an enabled rule, its sparkline draws a dashed reference line at the boundary of the healthiest enabled threshold. The gap between the trend and the line shows how close the Signal is to changing state.
Delta arrows and sparkline colors reflect the configured directionality. For a Lower-is-better Signal such as churn risk, a rising value is red. Display-only Signals, and all Signals in Bound State mode, render gray because no direction has been declared good or bad.
When explanations and expandable rows are enabled, expanding an entity shows a larger trend chart for each Signal that triggered its state. The chart plots the Signal's history against the exact recovery boundary, in the color of the triggered state, so the explanation and its evidence appear together.
In Calculated Rules, configure at least one contributing Signal with an enabled threshold. Adding a State column is not the fix unless you intend to switch modes.
Check for a blank or unmapped bound State, a blank current Signal, missing Period history, or a missing paired Target required by the configured comparison.
Power BI is probably using Count. Replace the implicit aggregation with a measure that returns the intended value.
Reorder Targets so their positions match the Signals field well.
Confirm that Period is bound and each entity has at least two populated values for the Signal.
That is expected in Bound State mode. The supplied State is authoritative; Signals are not silently reevaluated.
Signal tiles show the measure name and truncate long names with an ellipsis; hover shows the full name. For clean tiles, give measures short display names such as "Revenue" instead of "DB TimeSeriesRevenue".
Gray means the Signal has no configured directionality, so Decision Board will not claim a change is good or bad. Set Higher is better or Lower is better in Signal rules to enable meaningful colors.
Include your Power BI environment, field wells, and screenshots.
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