The most common design mistake in BI Portal is not a wrong widget or a missing filter — it is trying to fit an entire department's reporting needs onto one page. BI Portal's answer is multi-page boards, and the layout engine underneath them.
Pages, not tabs bolted on later
- Add a page with the + Page control at the bottom of the designer
- Rename it by double-clicking or through its settings
- Widgets belong to whichever page is active when you place them — moving a widget between pages is a deliberate action, not accidental drag
- A Tooltip-type page is different from a Normal page: it holds chart tooltip content and never appears in the runtime page bar
- Add a Page Navigator widget (menu or button style) once you have two or more Normal pages, so end users move between sections without hunting for tabs
Grid vs Free layout
Grid mode arranges widgets into column/row cells — fast to build, consistently aligned, best for standard KPI boards. Free mode is a fine-grained canvas, closer to Power BI's free placement, useful when a design calls for overlapping shapes or a more visual, less boxy layout.
Why it matters
A single overloaded page slows down for everyone — more widgets means more concurrent queries and a longer initial load, even when most of those widgets answer questions only one team cares about. Splitting a board into pages by audience or by process step (overview → detail → exceptions) keeps each page fast and keeps the design itself easier to reason about six months later, when someone else has to maintain it.