Report export and dashboards

[Ishmail575]

I am new to PowerBI, and struggling to get to grips with it as part of an apprenticeship, so I would appreciate if someone could explain how you integrate PowerBI into reporting and dashboards.

As I understand it, once you have completed your data processing in PowerBI, you can create a dashboard as part of a report, which you can then export to print, or to share/publish on a portal or website.

However, what I don't understand is how you can create "live" dashboards that can be accessed by customers and/or colleagues, and how PowerBI may or may not be involved in that stack.

Can PowerBI produce a "live" report/dashboard that will automatically reflect updates in the data?

If not, can it be automated to update and republish to reflect updates in the data?

Or, if neither of these are possible, perhaps PowerBI is not involved in such dashboards? If so, then would I be right in thinking that PowerBI exports the data in a form that another application can then use to create the dashboard?

Any clarification appreciated.

[Shaurya · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ishmail575,

I'll try to clarify as many things as I can. A Power BI solution in itself is a report which has visuals, slicers and buttons to navigate through your report. A dashboard is slightly different from a report as it only has visuals, pinned onto a canvas, which may come from one or more reports. A dashboard is like a snapshot so it does not allow you to use filters and slicers.

Once you load your data in a Power BI Report which is done on Power BI Desktop, you do the transformations on the data if required, create a data model and finally build your report. Your report is then published in a Power BI Workspace which is in Power BI Service (app.powerbi.com). Once you have published the report in service, you can pin the visuals from that report to dashboards which are also viewed in service. You can also print, share and embed your report.

When we add a data source while creating the report in desktop, we get the option to choose Import mode or Direct Query. Live data can be seen in reports that are using Direct Query. All reports have an underlying dataset which basically is all the information that is injected into the UI of your report.

If you are a free user you will only be able to publish reports in your personal workspace and you cannot create new workspaces. People who share reports with customers and colleagues have atleast a Power BI Pro license which allows you to create new workspaces and add other users in it.  

Reports that use import mode instead of direct query do not show live data. However, we do have the option of scheduling refreshes for your dataset which would in turn update the numbers in your report. Pro users are restricted to 8 scheduled refreshes a day while Premium Per Users can schedule upto 48. Apart from that, we can do a manual refresh on the datasets as many times as we want.

Power BI does not export data into another form or application. It connects to a data source, uses that information to display in the various visuals and metrics that are added and once it is published, the report and dataset both end up in Power BI Service, which can be opened on the browser. You use the report to view the KPIs and dataset to schedule refreshes, enter credentials and stuff like that.

Power BI reports can also be embedded into other web applications but even then, it is not sending data to any app. It just becomes available within another app.

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[Ishmail575]

Excellent response. Thank you so much for the clarification