Export to PowerPoint (Preview) feedback

[tzvikei]

This thread was created to gather feedback and communicate over the new Export to PowerPoint (Preview) feature in PowerBI.com.

Ask questions, suggest features, or leave general feedback. We will monitor closely.

Thanks,

Tzvi Keisar

Program Manager, Power BI

[tabar]

This feature is awesome. But I have found a little problem and it is the regional format. For instance I am in germany and we use this format: 1.228,34 but as I export it to PowerPoint it changes to English format: 1,228.34 or the row of sum (automatically calculated by Power BI) in tables is not more in German but in English: (geman) Gesamt -> (english) Total. There are some more details that could improve but this one is essentially. Thanks a lot for updates 🙂

[ElsD]

I tried the export on 1 report and these are my findings:

Textbox: -        Title is not visible; -        Text is centered instead of left aligned -        Upper textbox is gone (header) -        Lower textbox is doubled (footer) -        Added Link does not work

Gauge: -        Value font and size is different -        Added text is doubled

Slicer -        Eraser is shown left instead of right

[erhodes]

Really glad to see this feature added. The 'Last data refresh" and "Downloaded at" times are incorrect, dates are right, just not the times which is odd.  I look fwd to the ability to filter the report in the service and export the filtered report instead of the default report.  thanks for conitnuing to innovate and add functionality.

[Affo]

Unable to export to PowerPoint

We couldn't export your report to a PowerPoint file
Please try again later or contact support. If you contact support, please provide these details.

Activity IDfdf76dd0-90d2-4db2-ab27-3394c48e5975

Request IDdf3308b6-07b9-5f22-e97a-c37ee1b07fcf

Correlation ID96bde9aa-dc27-2161-8854-39cd65cb9da2

Status code500

TimeSun Oct 30 2016 14:23:08 GMT+0100 (W. Europe Standard Time)

Version13.0.1700.493

Cluster URIhttps://wabi-north-europe-redirect.analysis.windows.net

[WESTi]

I keep getting blank visuals when I export to PowerPoint on my reports that are using direct query. To resolve this I have to go into every report and click on each page to let the visuals load and then export to get the visuals to appear on the export. This is very time consuming when I have 10+ 15 page reports (thats 150 report pages I have to click into to get a full set of reports run for our budget).

Preferably I would like this export option to refresh upon exporting for direct query reports.

Is there anything I can do now to make my life easier?

Thanks

[knpbi]

Good feature, but got blindsided when I tried to use filters.

We have reports that have default filters on them. Consumers of the report (no edit permission), changed the filters and when exporting to PowerPoint the current filters weren't honored. So wrong report was generated 😞

Folks went back to doing screen shots or other ways around.

Overall, good progress on the feature, but quite not usuable yet in our case.

[padillam]

Power BI is a agreat product and thanks to you gets better everyday!

I would like to see the export to PowerPoint for single charts also.

Keep up the good work! 🙂

[AnandAmirtharaj]

Hi,

When i click on Export to PowerPoint, i get a message box on the top right corner saying "in progress" then after few seconds it vanishes and nothing had been downloaded to my downloads folder. Please help !

Best Regards,

Anand

[Anonymous]

It's great that we can export a report into powerpoint, however there are some instances where I have multiple reports for a dashboard. Would it be possible to export an entire dashboard to powerpoint instead of just a report? Thanks! 

[calvince]

Really cool feature. Great work guys.

It would be awesome if you could schedual exports with different filter configurations.

Also, is there a plan to support custom visuals any time soon? The majority of the visuals on our report are custom. Why are custom visuals not supported by default? What is difference compared to the out of the box visuals?

Thanks

Calvin

[Meagan]

I guess I'm just echoing what everyone else has said, but I think this is an important feature. I'm a consultant who has a lot of demo reports as well as reports that I have made for clients. I don't have a single report that works with the current export to PowerPoint preview.  I understand there are limitations in preview functionality, but what we have in this initial preview doesn't qualify as a minimum viable product to me. It does look like a good start, though.  

I would have preferrred you focus on enabling in-session interactivity first, but from a static export standpoint, fixing backgorund images and shading should be fixed sooner rather than later.  I can understand not having custom and R visuals available right away.

Here is an example of a report I built and the resulting PPTX, as well as my thoughts. 

Power BI Report (published to web): https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNGUzZjI5MWYtNGE4ZC00NzY1LTg4NGMtYzgyZGUxZGZiMjdhIiwidCI6IjRlZ...

Exported PowerPoint: https://1drv.ms/p/s!AtDPLqci_xrRhK5T38SjXGhSpKL63Q

I do like the initial slide that is added with the download time, data refresh time, and link to the online report. I had a title report page that was just one big image, and it was exported nicely.

My next page was just text and images, providing an explanation of the data in the following report pages. It didn't retain the background color set on the slide. The images came over mostly ok, except they caught some of the text in them and then the text was moved over to the right more, so it looks like a bad image capture job. I had small dots (images) placed next to 4 lines of text that were left aligned. The text was centered and part of the text was captured in the image of the dot, I think because that is the actual size of the image boxes in the report.  

The custom images didn't come through (this was expected) on slide 4. It seems the background color of the page is not being set so when images don't come through you see the white background. I am sure this is rather complicated, but I wonder if you could capture the whole thing as one image or programmatically set the packground color of the slide in the PPTX file to make this work.

Same thing happend with the background color on slide 5. I am also curious how difficult it would be to retain hyperlinks from tables. We can do this with PDFs in other applications where the links still work, so I'm hopeful. 

[Ikeumlaut]

Hey,

now I cant even export anything: I just get an error message:

Activity ID30d0f967-8bd5-4130-b8e2-76fa1f9d6536

Request ID9700c246-cc15-00ef-f0c6-d997665e9308

Correlation ID97adf181-1e62-219d-606b-e0153ea61163

Status code500

TimeMon Oct 24 2016 15:27:08 GMT+0300 (FLE Standard Time)

Version13.0.1700.457

Cluster URIhttps://wabi-north-europe-redirect.analysis.windows.net

-Ike

[Anonymous]

The content looks good, but the View in PowerBI link doesn't work well.  I am logged into PowerBI via a 365 account, but when I click the link it takes me to the log in to PowerBI page even though I am already logged in.  When I log in a second time, it takes me to my default workspace, and not the one in the powerpoint.  Even if I click the link again it takes me to the default page.

I'm hoping that the interactions work, but hard to tell as they just take me to the login page again.

[Ikeumlaut]

Dear Microsoft Power BI Team,

I really really like Power BI, and I REALLY hope you make the PPT export function work properly. Currently it has a lot of small detailed issues that make using it pretty much useless. Just make it print out what I see in Power BI as is, static pictures are just fine. Currently it is not possible and make working with it extremenly frustrating. Here is a list of issues I've encoutered:

-If a graph's edege (the stupid large white box surrounding every graph that makes placing stuff at edges impossible!) is on top of another graph the export does not function properly. Once you move one of those images in PPT you notice part of the graph is actually part of the other picture, I'll send an image to the email address you provided in the previous post.

-If a graph does not have a background the export picture should also not have a background. Why? Because I want to use in PPT slide master to finish the visual look, as visual functionalities are very limited in Power BI. Currently this is not possible, as imported pictures to PPT have background.

-Some exported graphs with background leave small white lines, I'll send an image to the provided email address

-Category label text are cut off in the PPT export even though they are not in Power BI, will also send an email of the issue

-Custom page size is not supported. The exported pictures are all over the PPT slide, not even hitting the actual slide. They are outside the PPT slide! Why I use custom page size? Well, because the graph visual editing functionalities are limited and I need to get more room to avoid the freaking scrolling bar inside a bar graph or table. Please fix that also!

-exported text is not aligned as defined in Power BI, text somehow always get centered in the export

-if text on top of a box -> everything get just messed up in the export and makes it totally useless

-text boxes sometimes duplicated twice

-using background image makes the export useless (this has come up in the forum quite a lot and thank you for fixing it in the future)

-Only 15 pages, I create project reports for customers and the reports are long, support at least 50 pages

Thanks! Will update the list as I encouter bugs.

Please, pretty please, fix this stuff! Would help a lot in creating reports faster

Kind regards,

Ilkka M.

[jcarville]

Clearly what people want is split into two seperate areas:

• Interactive PowerPoints
• The ability to have a print out of a report that mirrors the online version

As @Ikeumlaut said "Just make it print out what I see in Power BI as is, static pictures are just fine." This is the side that I think is important and in my opinion if the print function of reports actually worked this would solve this.

In IE there is no preview option for printing, in Chrome there is a preview but the reports are still not an exact replica of the report (visuals/lines cut off etc) and also the fact that images that are in reports dont print out is a big issue.

In an ideal world people would meet around a screen and discuss visuals etc but a lot of the time people want a print out to go with these meetings and at the moment its a painful screenshot and stitch these together in paint process.

I hope this feedback is useful.

[Anonymous]

I agree with @jcarville. The print options are very buggy for each browser and in the end don't work. Static images should be the most important item first and if they don't get to Power Point in the format you see as well with the filters you've added it makes both the print function and export to power point not usefulunfortunately.

[Anonymous]

I'm glad to see things are moving in the right direction with a highly requested update. Unfortunately this isn't quite useful yet. It would be great to have the whole interactivity but that isn’t the problem. The core ability of Power BI is to filter and drill down into the data. Right now since the export to PowerPoint doesn't consider any of the filters you've put in; the data you want to show doesn’t translate to the PowerPoint file. Basically you would have to create a new report for each filter which doesn't make any sense. Fixing this would make it a useful new tool. Interactivity can come later please.

[larryrj]

I love the new PPT export feature.  I want to echo the comments that the key limitation is the export doesn't take into account the current filters that have been applied to the dashboard.  I wouldn't think this is too hard to enable.  It would add a huge amount of value to my organization if this was implemented.  

[ianmonat]

Good first step towards bridging the web dashboards with the offline world, but ultimately not useful until the session interactivity is captured in the export.

[nagarwal1366]

Hi,

I have created custom visuals for a client. There is a requirement to export dashboards along with the custom visuals to powerpoint. I am aware that custom visuals currently cannot be exported to excel.

When can we expect this feature to be included.

Thanks

[trebgatte]

Passing on client feedback as I think you'll find it relevant. The general scenario is for time savings in creating these PPTX decks so much of their feedback focuses on that aspect. The clients are typically business centric users, not techies. They are posting to a central location, emailing to vendors, etc.

Assume the final recipient of the deck has zero connectivity to the data source. The user wants to control what the final recipient sees so interactivity is not valuable.

First, they want the ability to select the reports in a data model to download. Otherwise, their next workflow step is to go through the download and delete what they don't want.

A pop-up would suffice for now, though long term, the ability to create multiple download profiles for a data model would be great. Any reports that are sized for Cortana should be excluded automatically for download. I can see filters being part of the download profiles as an enhancement. 

Second, as branding is huge for many clients, they need the ability to download into a designated PPTX template. Otherwise, they have to copy/paste the download to an approved PPTX template. Some use 4:3, some use 16:9 so there's that aspect to consider as well. 

Overall, it's been very well received.

Treb Gatte | Business Solutions MVP/Power BI Partner | Power BI Recordings | @tgatte | Blog