Automatically fetch visuals links in a dashboard + download visuals as images

[Laurene]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently working on a project where I need to link a dashboard to word and powerpoint. The goal is that everytime the dashboard is updated, the modifications are automatically transfered to the powerpoint and word reports. I can add links to each power bi visuals to my powerpoint with the ppt add-in, but I have two problems:

1. I cannot do the same for word. Apparently there are no add-ins for word like there is for ppt. So if there are no solutions to link pbi visuals to word, is it possible to automatically download the pbi visuals as images?
2. I need to fetch the link to each visual in my dashboards automatically (and maybe put them in an excel), is it possible to do that? Maybe with the pbi api or a python script?

Thank you in advance for your help,

Best Regards,

Laurene

[Sahir_Maharaj · Accepted solution]

Hello @Laurene,

1. You can use Power Automate to export Power BI reports to Word documents as PDFs, but this may not allow you to update visuals dynamically. (Another approach would be to embed Power BI reports in a Word document using live links)

2. A Python script can be used in conjunction with the Power BI REST API to download the images.

import requests
from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth

# Replace with your credentials and Power BI API details
CLIENT_ID = 'your-client-id'
CLIENT_SECRET = 'your-client-secret'
TENANT_ID = 'your-tenant-id'
WORKSPACE_ID = 'your-workspace-id'
REPORT_ID = 'your-report-id'
VISUAL_ID = 'your-visual-id'
API_ENDPOINT = f'https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{WORKSPACE_ID}/reports/{REPORT_ID}/exportToFile'

# Authentication
auth_url = f"https://login.microsoftonline.com/{TENANT_ID}/oauth2/v2.0/token"
auth_params = {
    'grant_type': 'client_credentials',
    'client_id': CLIENT_ID,
    'client_secret': CLIENT_SECRET,
    'scope': 'https://graph.microsoft.com/.default'
}
auth_response = requests.post(auth_url, data=auth_params)
access_token = auth_response.json().get('access_token')

# Requesting visual as an image
headers = {
    'Authorization': f'Bearer {access_token}'
}
response = requests.get(API_ENDPOINT, headers=headers)

if response.status_code == 200:
    with open(f"{VISUAL_ID}.png", 'wb') as f:
        f.write(response.content)
    print(f"Visual {VISUAL_ID} downloaded as an image.")
else:
    print(f"Failed to download visual. Status code: {response.status_code}")

Hope this helps.

[Sahir_Maharaj · Accepted solution]

Hello @Laurene,

1. You can use Power Automate to export Power BI reports to Word documents as PDFs, but this may not allow you to update visuals dynamically. (Another approach would be to embed Power BI reports in a Word document using live links)

2. A Python script can be used in conjunction with the Power BI REST API to download the images.

import requests
from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth

# Replace with your credentials and Power BI API details
CLIENT_ID = 'your-client-id'
CLIENT_SECRET = 'your-client-secret'
TENANT_ID = 'your-tenant-id'
WORKSPACE_ID = 'your-workspace-id'
REPORT_ID = 'your-report-id'
VISUAL_ID = 'your-visual-id'
API_ENDPOINT = f'https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{WORKSPACE_ID}/reports/{REPORT_ID}/exportToFile'

# Authentication
auth_url = f"https://login.microsoftonline.com/{TENANT_ID}/oauth2/v2.0/token"
auth_params = {
    'grant_type': 'client_credentials',
    'client_id': CLIENT_ID,
    'client_secret': CLIENT_SECRET,
    'scope': 'https://graph.microsoft.com/.default'
}
auth_response = requests.post(auth_url, data=auth_params)
access_token = auth_response.json().get('access_token')

# Requesting visual as an image
headers = {
    'Authorization': f'Bearer {access_token}'
}
response = requests.get(API_ENDPOINT, headers=headers)

if response.status_code == 200:
    with open(f"{VISUAL_ID}.png", 'wb') as f:
        f.write(response.content)
    print(f"Visual {VISUAL_ID} downloaded as an image.")
else:
    print(f"Failed to download visual. Status code: {response.status_code}")

Hope this helps.

[Laurene]

Hello,

Thank you very much for your help and your answer! How can I know the visuals id though? My goal is ultimately to automatically fetch the visuals links, so having to manually get the ids kind of defeats the purpose. 

Thank you!

Laurene

[v-jianpeng-msft · Accepted solution]

Your solution is so great @Sahir_Maharaj 

Hi, @Laurene 

You can call Power BI's API interface from the tutorial below to export your report to a file.
As you mentioned, there are a few programming languages that you can do that. Super user gives a good sample code.

Export Power BI embedded analytics reports API - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

If you want to get the ID in visual, here there are two official ways to do it:

In addition, you can also check out the following community cases with the same problem, in which there is also a way to get the visual ID:

Solved: identifying visualname in Custom Visuals - Microsoft Fabric Community

Best Regards

Jianpeng Li

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Laurene]

Thank you very much for your help @v-jianpeng-msft @Sahir_Maharaj !