Summary

The Power BI service allows your users to see the same reports on a web or mobile platform with the same type of interactivity as they experience in Power BI Desktop. It also allows users to build reports quickly, straight from a web platform. Once your reports are deployed to the service, you can use row-level security to see data at a granular level, allowing a sales manager to only see their own territory, for example. The data can also be refreshed as often as every 30 minutes. If you're using on-premises data sources, then you can use the on-premises gateway to bring data from on-premises to the cloud.

In the next chapter, we will learn about Power BI dataflows, one of the newest and most powerful self-service options for Power BI users.

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You've spent the course of this book creating amazing reports using the Power BI Desktop client. Hopefully, you feel more confident in your skills and ready to take the next steps. Now, it's time to share those reports with your team, company, or customers. In this chapter, you're going to learn about the Power BI service and how to use it for the following:

• Deploying reports to the Power BI Service
• Creating and interacting with dashboards
• Sharing your reports and dashboards
• Setting up row-level security
• Scheduling data refreshes

The Power BI service begins at a freemium model...

Deploying reports to the Power BI service

There are numerous ways to publish a report to the PowerBI.com service, but the easiest way is by using Power BI Desktop. To do this, you'll need to simply open the report you want to deploy to the Power BI service, then click the Publish button in the desktop application, as shown in the following screenshot. If you have not previously signed in with your free PowerBI.com account, you will be prompted to create one or sign in with an existing account:

Figure 8.1: Power BI Sign in window that links your account from the Desktop to the Service

You'll then be asked which workspace you want to deploy to. A workspace is an area in the Power BI service much like a folder, where you can bundle your reports, datasets, and dashboards. You can also assign security to the workspace and not have to worry about securing each item individually.

Most importantly, it allows for team development of a Power BI solution, where you can have multiple...

Creating and interacting with dashboards

Once you have deployed your datasets and are using them in reports, you're ready to bring together the many elements into a single dashboard. Often, your management team is going to want a unified executive dashboard that combines elements such as sales numbers, bank balances, customer satisfaction scores, and more into a single dashboard. The amazing thing about dashboards in Power BI is that data can be actionable and reacted to quickly. You can strategically display the most important information your viewers need to see from multiple reports and pages. For a deeper dive, you can click on any dashboard element and be immediately taken to the report that is the source for that information. You can also subscribe to the dashboard and create mobile alerts when certain numbers on the dashboard reach a milestone.

Now, let's jump in and apply this knowledge.

Creating your first dashboard

To create your first dashboard, start by opening...

Sharing your dashboards

Sharing in Power BI is quite simple, but you'll want to consider what your goal is first. If your goal is simply to share a view-only version of a report or dashboard that users could engage with, the basic sharing mechanism can do that. Conversely, if your goal is to allow users to also edit the report, you will want to use a workspace and assign roles to users in the workspace settings. Lastly, if you want to logically package reports and dashboards together, and have the ability to have fine control over which reports can be seen by default, consider using Power BI apps.

The easiest way to share a dashboard or report is to simply click Share on the ribbon of any report or dashboard. Simply type the email address of the user that you want to share with and what type of access you want to give them.

Figure 8.13: Creating a workspace in the Power BI service

While you can't allow them to edit the report or dashboard, they will be able to view and reshare...