Power BI Publishing : From Design to Distribution

Recently people have been asking how they can publish their Power BI reports, so here’s a quick post on the process with some tips for good practice…:

From Desktop to the Power BI Service

1. Licensing: Make sure you have a Power BI Pro license, or reach out to a teammate who has one to help you publish your reports.
2. Saving the file: First start by saving your desktop report to a shared location – you’ll get version control and the better resilience as ownership changes over time. It’s good to follow a naming convention and implement a folder structure for your reports if you have many of them.
3. Publish from Desktop: Once you’re happy with your report in Power BI Desktop, click the ‘Publish’ button at top right of the ‘Home’ ribbon. Choose the workspace – it will need to be a premium one if you want to people outside the Office 365 Group (or MS Team members) to access it. Once it’s uploaded, you’ll get a popup saying ‘Open [your report name] in Power BI’
4. Team Access: Click on the link, it will take you to the report in the workspace; you should see your report there, be able to continue editing it online, and anyone else in the team associated with the workspace ought have access
5. Organisation Access: To publish to the entire organisation, the workspace will need to be assigned a ‘Premium’ capacity – it’ll have a wee diamond beside its’ name. Head to the workspace from the left navigation and click ‘Create/Update’ app’ in the top right corner. Once updated, you’ll be prompted to ‘go to app’, which everyone in your organisation will have access to. It will also be available to people under the Apps page in Power BI online
6. Share: To share the link to the app, go to it and copy the URL. Append &chromeless=true to it to give visitors a full-screen experience, and use URL filters to provide targeted links to specific audiences

To check if your workspace is premium, click on ‘workspaces’ from the left navigation in Power BI online. The ones with a wee diamond beside them are. If yours isn’t, and you want it to be, put in a request to your Power BI Admin team to assign the capacity to it.

Hopefully that quick overview will help anyone get over the main hurdles. Comprehensive training on publishing is here:

Publish and share in Power BI – Learn
Publish and share your Power BI reports and dashboards to teammates in your organization or to everyone on the web

Embedding Reports in Sharepoint

To embed a report in a Sharepoint page, the Power BI webpart is the obvious choice; however the webpart has a couple of limitations:

• URL parameters are not supported
• If the user hasn’t installed the app the report lives in, they’ll see an error (best to add some helper text and a direct link to the report; or get your Power BI admin to publish the report to the entire organisation)

An alternative which gets around the above limitations, and also works on pages outside Sharepoint, is to:

1. Ensure the page you want to embed has been set to ‘View/Page view/Fit to width’ – This will make it responsive to the viewer’s display screen
2. Once you’ve published your app, head to the report and at top left click ‘File/Embed/Website or portal’ and copy the iframe code:
   
   
3. Append the following parameters to the URL in the iframe code according to your needs:
   1. Hide the bottom tabs: &navContentPaneEnabled=false
   2. Hide the filter pane: &filterPaneEnabled=false
   3. Specify a page: &pageName=[ReportSection####] – grab this from the URL of the report page
   4. Filter your report: &filter=[table/column eq 'value'] (guidance on URL filters)
4. Add an ’embed’ web part to the page and paste the iframe code into its settings. Change the width and height values, 100% for each can work well. Careful with heights over 1200px as the ‘sign in’ button gets vertically centred
5. A cunning way to let users change what they see in the report is to connect the embed web part to a list web part on the page; the URL can then be changed dynamically based on the item selected in the list. For instance: &filter=table/column eq '[$Title]' or src="[$ReportURL]"

Version Control

Options in the Power BI service for version control are limited. It’s best to manage version control with the desktop version of the .pbix report. Save your .pbix report in a SharePoint document library folder with version control turned on, then open this file from desktop and when you save it a new version will be created. To access previous versions go to the library and to the right of the title click o the … to access previous versions.

Mobile Version

If your audience is likely to be consuming your report on the go, consider publishing a mobile version of the report. Within Desktop there’s an easy way to achieve this. Click on the ‘View’ tab where you’ll find the ‘Mobile’ button. From here you get the option to ‘Auto-create mobile layout’ which provides a great start – though you’ll likely need to resize, move, and remove visualisations to ensure a useful experience for people using the Power BI Mobile app.