You can create an Office document in Excel and PowerPoint in which you embed one or more Power BI visualizations. You can create a PowerPoint presentation in which you show live data from Power BI.
In a similar way, you can create an Excel workbook in which you embed some visualizations from Power BI on the same page where you also have other data presented with standard Excel tools. This is possible thanks to a free third-party add-in called Power BI Tiles, which takes advantage of the Power BI APIs (these APIs will be explained in more detail later in this chapter). If you are not a developer, you still might be interested in the technical details; you just want to use the existing tool.
You can download Power BI Tiles from the Office Store. It is compatible with Microsoft Office 2013 Service Pack 1, or any following version, including Office 2016. If you have a subscription to Office 365 that includes the licensing of desktop applications, you should already have a compatible version of Office installed on your computer.
Note Power BI Tiles is a free add-in created by DevScope; it is not a Microsoft product, but as of this writing, there are no corresponding solutions produced by Microsoft. You do not need administrative rights to install Power BI Tiles.
Let’s visit with David once again, and consider how he can create a PowerPoint presentation that embeds some of the visualizations he created while working on the budget. In PowerPoint, on the ribbon, on the Insert tab, David clicks the Store button, as shown in Figure 8-12.
Figure 8-12: The Store button on the PowerPoint ribbon.
In the Office Add-Ins dialog box, in the search box, David types “power bi tiles,” which presents him with the result depicted in Figure 8-13.
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Figure 8-13: A list of available Office add-ins, filtered by the string “power bi tiles” in the search box.
Note If you do not have PowerPoint installed locally and you want to use Office online, you can still use the add-ins available in the Office Store by using the online version of the Office
application.
After David installs the add-in, Power BI Tiles becomes available on the PowerPoint ribbon, on the Insert tab, in the My Add-Ins list, as demonstrated in Figure 8-14.
Figure 8-14: The Power BI Tiles add-in on the PowerPoint ribbon in the My Add-Ins list.
When David clicks Power BI Tiles in the list of My Add-Ins, PowerPoint inserts a new rectangular object in the current slide that will display the content of a report or a dashboard. Within this area, you are prompted to choose between connecting to your Power BI account or displaying a public report (Chapter 2 explains how to publish a report to a webpage for public access), as shown in Figure 8-15.
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Figure 8-15: You can choose between connecting to a Power BI account or public reports for Power BI Tiles.
The first time David connects to Power BI, he is asked to grant authorization for Power BI Tiles to access certain Power BI features, as shown in Figure 8-16.
Figure 8-16: Power BI authorization request for Power BI Tiles access.
David clicks Accept, which authorizes Power BI to accept requests coming from Power BI Tiles. He now can use dashboards and reports available in any Power BI workspaces to which he has access. David can select either a dashboard or a report, and he needs to consider that there are a few differences in the visualizations and user interactions between the two. For example, Figure 8-17 depicts the list of reports available to David in the Power BI Tiles visualization in a PowerPoint slide. In this example, he chose the Budget 2016 group workspace, using the middle button of the three in the upper-right corner of the area used by the Power BI add-in. The list of reports displays the only report published in the workspace: Budget Totals. If you want to see the list of available dashboards in the same workspace, click the Dashboards button, located directly to the left of Reports, above the report list.
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Figure 8-17: A Power BI Tiles object inserted in a PowerPoint slide lists the available reports to display.
After David selects a report, it is rendered within the workspace of the PowerPoint slide. If the report size is larger than the available space, scrollbars will appear, as shown in Figure 8-18. The report embedded by Power BI Tiles is fully functional and interactive, so David can use filters and zoom single visualizations of the report, exactly as he can do on the Power BI website. He can even utilize this interaction in Slide Show mode.
Figure 8-18: A slide in PowerPoint that embeds the content of the Budget Totals report.
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You can change the objects displayed in the Power BI Tiles add-in by going back to the list of
dashboards and reports (refer back to Figure 8-17). To do that, below the report, click the Back button (the left arrow), which is the one farthest left.
If you select a dashboard, you obtain a slightly different behavior: the Power BI Tiles add-in displays only one visualization from a dashboard at a time. If the dashboard contains two or more
visualizations, arrows will appear on the left and right side of each one, which you can click to scroll through the visualizations, as illustrated in Figure 8-19. In this example, only one of the two available visualizations in the Budget Totals dashboard (which, by the way, are the same visualizations used in the report) is visible on the slide. Each visualization takes up the entire amount of space available, which makes them easier to view, but you do not have any interaction with the charts.
Figure 8-19: A slide in PowerPoint with embedded visualizations of the Budget Totals dashboard.
Whether you choose to embed a dashboard or a report depends on the type of presentation you are creating. If you want to interact with the data, you can modify either choice during the presentation, navigating in the list of dashboards and reports available. However, you should choose the
visualization that is more readable and effective for your presentation.
If you want to refresh the data during the presentation, click the Refresh button, which is the second one from the right, below the Power BI Tiles add-in (see Figure 8-19).
You also can use the Power BI Tiles add-in in Excel, creating a worksheet that displays a visualization from Power BI next to data rendered in Excel; for example, using a PivotTable. The features of this add-in work well in Office online, too.