Optimise a Power BI Dashboard for Phones - Mobile Layout Done Properly

Most executives I work with have already decided how they will consume their dashboards. They open them on a phone in the back of a taxi, between meetings, or while standing in a hardware store trying to remember whether the Brisbane branch hit target. The desktop layout you spent three days perfecting is not what they see. They see a single column of tiles, all the same width, scrolling down until they run out of patience.

That is the default behaviour of a Power BI dashboard on a phone in portrait mode. Every tile stacks in order, every tile is the same size, and the important number can end up four screens down. Power BI has a feature for this, called the mobile layout or phone view, and it is one of the more useful things in the service that people don't use. This post covers how it works, what it changes, and the traps we've watched teams fall into.

What the phone view actually does

The phone view is a separate arrangement of the same dashboard tiles. You don't build new visuals for it and you don't create a second report. You take the tiles that already exist on the dashboard and decide how they should appear when someone holds the phone upright.

The steps in the Power BI service are straightforward:

1. Open the dashboard in the Power BI service.
2. Select the arrow next to Edit on the top menu, then select Mobile layout.
3. In the phone edit view, drag, resize or unpin tiles to suit the portrait screen.
4. When you're happy, switch back using Web layout in the top menu.

Power BI saves the phone layout automatically, so there's no separate publish step. That convenience is also where the first trap sits, which I'll come back to.

Two details worth knowing. First, the Mobile layout option only appears if you are the dashboard owner. If a colleague who has edit rights on a shared dashboard wants to change the phone view, they won't see it, and you will need to do it yourself or transfer ownership. Second, if you turn the phone sideways, viewers see the dashboard as it is laid out for the web. The phone view only applies in portrait mode. That's sensible, but it means you should design the portrait layout with the expectation that many people will never rotate their screen.

The thing that bites people: live editing

Microsoft's documentation makes a point that's easy to skim past. As you edit the phone view, anyone viewing the dashboard on a phone can see your changes in real time.

We've seen this go wrong in two ways. The first is cosmetic. A developer rearranges tiles at 4pm on a Thursday to test a new layout, and an executive who happens to be looking at the dashboard on their phone sees the screen jump around mid-meeting. Not catastrophic, but it erodes trust in the numbers.

The second is worse. Someone unpins every tile from the phone view to start fresh, and for a few minutes the dashboard on phones has no tiles at all. If a board member opens it during that window, they see an empty screen. The documentation literally uses this example, and it's a fair warning.

Our practice now is simple. Do phone layout work on a copy of the dashboard, or at least do it outside business hours. When the layout is finished, we check it on a real phone, held upright and turned sideways, before anyone else sees it. A preview on the desktop browser is not a substitute, because the tile proportions on a small screen are different enough to mislead you.

Choosing what goes on the phone

This is where the real design work is, and it's where most of our opinions come from.

A phone is a terrible place to read a dense chart. A clustered bar with twelve categories and a legend is useless on a 6-inch screen, and the person looking at it will either squint or give up. Phone tiles should carry the question the dashboard answers, not every supporting detail behind it.

In practice, we tend to pick three to five tiles for the phone view. Usually that's a headline KPI, a trend indicator showing whether the headline is moving the right way, one or two exceptions that need attention, and perhaps a single comparison against target. Everything else stays on the web layout, where people sit down at a desk and have time to explore.

The unpinned tiles go into an Unpinned tiles pane in the phone view. They stay there until someone adds them back, so nothing is deleted. That's useful, but it also means people sometimes forget tiles exist. When we hand a phone layout over to a client, we walk them through the unpinned pane so they know where things went.

If you want to reset everything to match the web layout, the Reset tiles option returns them to their previous size and order. One detail to note: opening the Mobile layout view slightly changes the size and shape of tiles on a phone, even before you make any edits. If you need the dashboard to return to its exact prior state, Reset tiles is the way to do it.

A few honest opinions

The phone view is a good feature, but it is a layout tool, not a design tool. You can rearrange and resize, and that's about it. You can't tune the visuals for a small screen beyond what the tile itself allows. If a visual is unreadable on a phone, the answer is usually to rebuild it as a simpler card or KPI, and that means going back to the report.

I also think the feature is underused because it's buried. Plenty of Australian teams we talk to have never heard of it, and they've spent money on mobile apps or custom portals to solve a problem that a properly arranged dashboard would handle. Before you commission anything, spend an afternoon on the phone view.

The last opinion is about ownership. Phone views are attached to the dashboard, which means they are only as maintained as the dashboard is. If the underlying report changes and a tile is renamed or removed, the phone view can end up with a gap or a stale tile. Put the phone layout on the same review cycle as the web version. It takes five minutes and prevents an executive opening a dashboard on a Monday morning to find a broken tile.

A quick checklist

• Confirm you are the dashboard owner, or arrange for the owner to make the change.
• Make layout changes away from peak viewing times, because edits go live immediately.
• Limit the phone view to three to five tiles that answer the main question.
• Check the result on a physical phone, both upright and turned sideways.
• Keep an eye on the Unpinned tiles pane so nothing gets forgotten.
• Review the phone layout whenever the underlying report changes.

If your leadership team is struggling to get useful answers from Power BI on the move, our Power BI consultants can review the dashboards with you and set up a sensible phone layout. For teams moving their reporting onto Fabric as well, our Microsoft Fabric consultants can help with the wider data model that feeds those tiles.

Source: Optimize a dashboard for mobile phones (Microsoft Learn)