Six teardowns of downloadable templates and example dashboards — what is inside the file, and where the free ones stop.
Every free template and screenshot gallery I opened and read to the end: which columns the file demands from your data, which parts it computes, and what you still have to build yourself.
The six teardowns
A .pbit holds no rows by design. I unzipped seven free Power BI templates: they name 389 columns, 245 of which your own data has to supply.
Six of the ten pages ranking for "dashboard template" are built for developers and designers. I opened all eight free Excel ones: no PivotTables, no data connections, nothing that refreshes. What to check before you download.
I copied 38 free Google Sheets dashboard templates and read their formulas. Nineteen stop summarising at a fixed row, and eight summarise nothing.
Eight of the nine pages ranking for 'Power BI dashboard examples' explain nothing about the model underneath — here's what a working example contains.
Six Excel dashboard layouts that cover almost every real need, the one question that picks between them, and the three layouts you see everywhere that you should never build — with the Excel mechanics for each.
A worked example of a good clinic KPI dashboard — what to put on one screen, which benchmarks are real, and why a dashboard that merely exists changes nothing.
Every dashboard named on the nine pages ranking for healthcare dashboard examples. All 89, with what each one needs, sorted so the ones you can build come first.