3. 63. Publishing Power BI Desktop reports to the Power BI Service
In this video, we’re going to talk about the power Bi service. So the power Bi desktop lives on your computer. Unless anyone has access to the files that you save, no one has access to your visualizations. However, if you go into the power Bi service, then you are able to start sharing. So let’s do that. First of all, I’m going to sign in top right, so I’ll type in my email address and password, and so the top right should sign me. And there we go.
Now you can do that while I’m going to file publish it will ask you to sign in as well. But this is the way I do it. I sign in and then I publish. So what I’m going to do now is publish this to power Bi. So, yes, I want to save any changes that I’ve made. And it’s good to say, where do you want to save it to? I will save it to my workspace.
So a workspace is somewhere where you can store dashboards and reports and data sets. So let’s just click select, and you can see. Now publishing it to the power Bi service. It’s missing the word service. It really should tell you where it is publishing it to. So success, I’ll now click on open, and this opens up your internet browser. And there we have on the internet our visualization, our report as it’s called. So it’s not called a dashboard, it’s called a report. The report comes from a data set. So the data set is what we have imported. Now, a dashboard can be bits from multiple reports, and what you can do is get a particular element of a report. So I’ll do this visual, I’m going to pin the visual, and I’m going to pin it to a dashboard.
So my new dashboard, so it creates a dashboard, and that dashboard now has that particular visualization pinned. Now you can create additional workspaces if you have got a pro license or a premium license. So a pro license costs around $10 per user per month. A premium license can cost $20 per user per month, or you can do an entire company from about $5,000 for the company per month. So I’m just going to click on try three, and this will give me access to the pro features for 60 days. And notice I didn’t have to type in any credit card details. And in fact, once 60 days expires, then it just stops. You don’t have to stop it yourself, it will automatically stop. So here I can create new workspaces, so I’ll create a new one. So my other workspace, and here we go.
So this gives you another workspace. And I can switch between my workspace, which is your own personal workspace, and any of your other workspaces. So now if I go into the power Bi desktop and I publish, it will say, okay, which of your two workspaces do you want to publish it. And of course, you can publish the same report, which may contain more than one page to multiple workspaces, if you so wish. So you can now see the report and the data set.
So from there again, what I can do is I can create a dashboard as well. So this is how you can publish reports from Pal Bi desktop to the Power Bi service. So in this particular certification, PO 100, you don’t need to know much more than what can each do, what can the desktop do and what can the service do? So, in the next video, we’re going to have a look at the capabilities of the Power Bi service.
4. 61. Create Power BI report by using Power BI service
So in this video, we’re going to have a look at the capabilities of the Power Bi Service. So you can create a new report by getting data. So we get data and you can see, you can pull data in from your workbooks. So these are Excel spreadsheets, though that’s very limited. Or data from Excel, Power, Bi desktop or CSV comma separated values files. So yet there’s a difference between workbooks, which are shown here, and data from Excel. So basically it’s just a pretty picture when you bring it in from workbox. There’s no data manipulation you can do. It’s just here is a snapshot of the spreadsheet. So notice that there isn’t that much more. If I click on Get for databases and I click on any of these, it says go to Desktop. So that’s not really useful.
Now this is where I used to end this and say, okay, we’ve got very few capabilities in the Power Bi Service. However, I think it was in 2020 that a new option was added, data Flaws. So if I click on Data Flaws, then this gets me to similar functionality as the Get and Transform for Power Bi Desktop. So you can see there is a huge range of data sources here. Now I should point out that HDFS Hadoop Files is not one of those. Now you can connect to these, you can also connect to data sources which are on your computer. Like for instance, maybe you’ve got an SQL Server on your computer, but that would require a gateway installing. So there has to be some way for the Power Bi Service to connect to your computer. So that’s called a gateway.
However, if you don’t need the data refreshing, you don’t need the gateway. So what I’m going to do, I’m just going to connect to an example. So I set up a sample SQL Server database on Azure. So I’m just going to paste in my details and then I can go to next to the bottom. Right? Now initially it won’t let me because it was blocked, so I’ve got to make sure that a particular IP address can connect to that. So now I’ve done that, there’s an opportunity to get and transform the data. So let me select this, a particular table, go on to Transform. And this should look fairly familiar as the menu looks very similar to the Power query editor that we saw in the Power Bi desktop.
So from there you can do the similar sort of things. You can transform columns, you can add new columns and so forth. So I can then click Save and Load, so save my new data flow and there we can get the data. Whilst I would then love to say, well, you can now use this data floor set of data to correct a report in Power Bi Service, you can’t actually do that. At the moment, the only way you can consume it is to consume it either externally or using Power Bi desktop.
So the data sets here not as useful as it could be. Now, I should point out that these data flaws can also be used in your Power apps. So if I go to Data and data flaws so this is completely different to the Power Automate flaws, then we get exactly the same sort of thing. So we get a choice of what query to use. So hopefully at some point in the future I’ll be able then to use this data set in Power Bi service Direct. But you’ve got to go to Power Bi desktop, create a report, and then upload it to the Power Bi service. So let’s just go back to the capabilities of the Power Bi service. So previously said that you can create a new report using data in an Excel spreadsheet, CSV files, Power Bi desktop files, and some other things like OneDrive and SharePoint. Incidentally, if you couldn’t see data flaws, it’s because you’re in my workspace. You need to be in a pro non personal workspace.
It can refresh using more data sources but not hadoop files. HTFs some types, like ones on your computer, may acquire gateways. You can create your new reports, including creating visualizations, and you can create cross report drill through reports as we’ve previously seen. So again, this picture should look very familiar with what we have seen in Power Bi desktop. However, you cannot get and transform data and you cannot develop models. So you can’t create calculated columns and measures. So you’d have to go to the data floors and then import that into Power Bi desktop. For that you can create Dashboards, so dashboards, parts of reports and some other things. You would need a pro license or premium capability. For that you can share apps. We’ll have a look at that in the next video. And you can access using the Power Bi mobile app.
So, just like you can access your apps through the Power Apps app, where you can use the Power Bi mobile app. So it’s probably useful at this stage just to compare and contrast Power Bi desktop and Power Bi service. So, on the Power Bi desktop, you can create reports using a huge number of data sources and can refresh those reports on the Power Bi service. Unless you’re using data flaws and we’ve seen the problem with that, you can’t actually consume it on Power Bi service. Then you have a limited range, but once it’s up there, you can refresh most data sources but not Hadoop files. HTFs and some types such as Dozer files which are on your computer, may require gateways.
On Power Bi desktop, you can create reports including Visualizations and Drill through reports and Power Bi service you can do the same, but you can also go from one report to another using cross report drill through reports. So I can go from page one of report A through to page two of report B. In Power Bi desktop, you can get and transform data, developed models, including calculated columns and measures. You can’t do that on the Power Bi service, but you can create dashboards if you’ve got a pro and premium capacity. You can also create workspaces and apps you can access using the Power Bi mobile app on the Power Bi service, but not for anything in the Power Bi desktop.
And you cannot share unless you give somebody your Power Bi desktop file. But you can create workspaces and share them if you’ve got pro or premium capability on the Power Bi service, and on both of them, you can change some security settings.
So we’ve seen how you can do that. In the Power Bi desktop is in file in Power Bi service you go to the relevant workspace, you go to the next to say the report, go to settings and then you have got various things that you can do. So you can choose the type of data you allow your end users to export, allow cross flu durable reports and that sort of thing. So these are the capabilities of the Power bi service.
