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Present Power BI Reports in PowerPoint

Building a super-cool Power BI dashboard with full interactivity (slicers, bookmarks, drill-through, etc.) can be quite satisfying.

But what do you do if you need to present this interactive dashboard in a meeting where PowerPoint is your only means of presentation?

Power BI does have a feature that allows you to export the screen as an image, but the image lacks all the wonderful interactivity.  Plus, if you must give the presentation at a later date, you’ll need to update all the exported images because the data will likely have changed.

Hope is just around the corner.

Power BI released a feature that allows you to export the dashboard to PowerPoint while retaining most if not all the functionalities.

Let’s give a warm, XelPlus welcome to  Embed Live Data .

Watch video tutorial

In this tutorial:

• Obtaining the Power BI Add-In for PowerPoint
• Testing Report Interactivity
• Adding a Power BI Report to an Existing Presentation
• Deeper Analysis During a Presentation
• Additional Presentation Features
• Sharing the Report

Working with the Power BI service online, we have a dashboard with the following interactive features:

• Slicers that allow us to filter by years
• Buttons that switch us between pages
• Slicers that allow us to select departments and channels

We want to export this dashboard to PowerPoint and retain interactivity.

Power BI now has an option behind the  Export  button called  Embed Live Data .

When selected, we have the option to open the dashboard in PowerPoint with or without the current filter selections.

NOTE:  As of this post’s publish date (July 2022), this feature was still in preview release.  It has since become generally available with the March 2023 release .

Selecting the  Open in PowerPoint  option presents the following message.

Clicking the “ Trust this add-in ” will load the Power BI report into a PowerPoint slide.

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We need to take a step back and talk about obtaining the Power BI add-in for PowerPoint.

Before we can just drop a Power BI report into PowerPoint as easily as has been demonstrated, you need to first visit the Microsoft Store and download and install the Power BI add-in for PowerPoint.

• Launch the Microsoft Office Add-Ins feature by selecting  Insert (tab) -> Add-ins -> Get Add-ins .
• Search the Office Add-Ins for “ Power BI ”.

Once added to PowerPoint, you will see the add-in on the  Insert  ribbon.

Power Excel Bundle

By having the Power BI add-in as part of PowerPoint, we have full interactivity in our PowerPoint slide, both in Presentation Mode and standard Slide Design Mode.

Notice that the only page we have from our report was the page displayed when we performed the  Embed Live Data  action.

If you need other pages from the report, those pages will need to be inserted separately.

One workaround to this is to include a page navigation interface on the needed pages.

Buttons and bookmarks are fully operational.

Excel Essentials for the Real World

When working with an existing presentation, we can easily add a Power BI report by creating a new, blank slide and selecting  Insert (tab) -> Power BI .

Our slide presents a placeholder that requests the link we saw earlier from the Power Bi service when we perform the initial export routine.

Click the  Copy  button to place the Power BI report link on the Clipboard.

Return to PowerPoint and paste the link in the placeholder and click  Insert .

In addition to the report’s slicers and buttons working during the presentation, we can also leverage Power BI’s filter controls.

This embedded report is arguably superior to embedding Excel dashboards as Excel’s interactivity does not carry over to PowerPoint.

Capturing a Screenshot

If you need to capture a screenshot of the report during the presentation, click the arrow button in the upper-right corner and select  Show as Saved image .

You can then right-click the report and copy it to the Clipboard for pasting it onto another slide or any other application.

To return to the interactive version of the report, click the arrow button in the upper-right corner and deselect  Show as Saved image .

Report Options

In the lower-right corner reside controls for hiding the filter pane, refreshing the data, and resetting the report.

Changing the Report’s Story

Any changes made to the Power Bi report in the PowerPoint slide  do not  flow back to Power BI.

However, changes to the Power BI report at the source  will  flow down to PowerPoint when the slide link is refreshed.

Deleting a Report from a Slide

Clicking a Power BI report on a slide and pressing the  Delete  key will not remove the report from the slide.

To remove the report from the slide, click the arrow button in the upper-right corner and select  Delete .

Hiding the Status Bar

If you don’t wish to display the bottom banner with the report add-in controls, click the down-arrow button in the lower-right of the report.

Viewing Report Status

The lower-left corner of the report displays the name of the Power BI report file as well as the date and time of the last refresh.

Clicking the report’s name will take you to the full report on the Power BI website.

If you share the report with an associate, the person with which you are sharing must have a Power BI account and have been granted access to the report and its underlying dataset.

The report and its data are not stored in the PowerPoint file, only a connection is created between PowerPoint and Power BI.  The interactivity is displayed in real-time as the presentation is being used.

All security permissions are retained and respected.

Leila Gharani

I'm a 6x Microsoft MVP with over 15 years of experience implementing and professionals on Management Information Systems of different sizes and nature.

My background is Masters in Economics, Economist, Consultant, Oracle HFM Accounting Systems Expert, SAP BW Project Manager. My passion is teaching, experimenting and sharing. I am also addicted to learning and enjoy taking online courses on a variety of topics.

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Basic concepts for the Power BI service business user

• 16 contributors

Use this article to familiarize yourself with some of the terms and concepts associated with the Power BI service. Understanding these terms and concepts makes it easier for you to read through the other Power BI articles and to work in the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com).

This article assumes that you already read the Power BI overview and identified yourself as a Power BI business user . Business users receive Power BI content, like dashboards, reports, and apps, from creator colleagues. Business users work with the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com), which is the website-based version of Power BI.

This article isn't about Power BI Desktop

You likely heard the term "Power BI Desktop" or just "Desktop." It's the stand-alone tool used by designers who build and share dashboards and reports with you. It's important to know that there are other Power BI tools out there. But, as long as you're a business user , you typically work with the Power BI service. This article applies only to the Power BI service.

For more information about the full suite of Power BI tools, see What is Power BI? .

Let's get started

To follow along, open app.powerbi.com in your browser.

There are many objects and concepts that make up the Power BI service, too many to cover in a single article. So this article introduces you to the most common: visualizations , dashboards , reports , apps , and semantic models (formerly called datasets ). These objects are sometimes referred to as Power BI content . Content exists within workspaces .

A typical Power BI workflow involves all of the building blocks. A Power BI designer (yellow in the diagram) collects data from semantic models , brings it into Power BI Desktop for analysis, and creates reports full of visualizations that highlight interesting facts and insights. The designer pins visualizations from reports to dashboards , and shares the reports and dashboards with business users like you (black in the diagram). There are many different ways that a designer can share content with you: as individual pieces of content, content bundled together in an app , or by giving you permissions to a workspace where the content is stored. (Don't worry, we talk about the different ways that content is shared later in this article.)

At its most basic:

For more info, see Interact with visuals in reports, dashboards, and apps .

For more info, see Dashboards for the Power BI service business users .

For more info, see Reports in Power BI .

To be clear, if you're logged in to the Power BI service for the first time, you probably don't see any shared dashboards, apps, or reports yet.

Workspaces are places to collaborate with colleagues on specific content. Workspaces are created by Power BI designers to hold collections of dashboards and reports. The designer can then share the workspace with colleagues. Designers can also bundle a collection of dashboards and reports into an app and distribute it to the entire community, to their organization, or to specific people or groups. Certain types of apps called template apps, create a workspace when the app is installed. Learn more about apps.

Everyone using the Power BI service also has a My workspace . My workspace is your personal sandbox where you can create content for yourself.

To see your workspaces in Power BI select Workspaces from your navigation pane.

[Learn more about workspaces].(end-user-workspaces.md)

Semantic models

A semantic model is a collection of data that designers import or connect to and then use to build reports and dashboards. As a business user , it's possible that you never interact directly with semantic models, but it's still helpful to learn how they fit into the bigger picture.

Each semantic model represents a single source of data. For example, the source could be an Excel workbook on OneDrive, an on-premises SQL Server Analysis Services tabular dataset, or a Google Analytics dataset. Power BI supports more than 150 data sources and is always adding more.

When a designer shares an app with you, or gives you permissions to a workspace, you can look up which semantic models are being used. But you can't add or change anything in the semantic model. This means that as you interact with dashboards and reports, the underlying data is safe. Changes you make to the dashboards and reports don't affect the semantic model.

One semantic model...

Can be used over and over by report designers to create dashboards, reports, and apps.

Can be used to create many different reports.

Visuals from that one semantic model can appear on many different dashboards.

To learn more about semantic models, visit these articles:

• How do designers assign permissions to semantic models
• How semantic models are shared with colleagues

On to the next building block, reports.

A Power BI report is one or more pages of visualizations, graphics, and text. All of the visualizations in a report come from a single semantic model. Designers build reports and share them with others; either individually or as part of an app. Typically, business users interact with reports in Reading view .

One report...

Can be created using data from only one semantic model. Power BI Desktop can combine more than one data source into a single semantic model in a report, and that report can be imported into Power BI.

Can be associated with multiple dashboards (tiles pinned from that one report can appear on multiple dashboards).

Can be part of multiple apps.

A dashboard represents a customized graphical view of some subset of one or more underlying semantic models. Designers build dashboards and share them with business users ; either individually or as part of an app. If a business user is given permissions to a report, they can build their own dashboards too. A dashboard is a single canvas that has tiles , graphics, and text.

Dashboards can look similar to a report page. You know that you're on a dashboard if you see a natural language query field in the upper left corner. Also, when you select a visual tile on a dashboard you jump to the underlying report or to a URL or to the natural language query that was used to create that tile. For more explanation, see Reports versus dashboards .

A tile is a rendering of a visual that a designer pins , for example, from a report to a dashboard. Most pinned tiles show a visualization that a designer created from a semantic model, saved in a report, and then pinned to that dashboard. A tile can also contain an entire report page and can contain live streaming data or a video. There are many ways that designers add tiles to dashboards, too many to cover in this overview article. To learn more, see Dashboard tiles in Power BI .

Business users can't edit dashboards. You can however add comments, view related data, set it as a favorite, subscribe, and more.

What are some purposes for dashboards? Here are just a few:

To see, in one glance, all the information needed to make decisions

To monitor the most-important information about your business

To ensure all colleagues are on the same page; viewing and using the same information

To monitor the health of a business or product or business unit or marketing campaign, and so on

To create a personalized view of a larger dashboard, all the metrics that matter to you

ONE dashboard...

Can display visualizations from many different semantic models

Can display visualizations from many different reports

Can display visualizations pinned from other tools (for example, Excel)

Visualizations

Visualizations (also known as visuals) display insights that Power BI discovers in the data. Visualizations make it easier to interpret the insight, because your brain can comprehend a picture quicker than it can comprehend a spreadsheet of numbers.

Just some of the visualizations available in Power BI are: waterfall, ribbon, treemap, pie, funnel, card, scatter, and gauge.

See the full list of visualizations included with Power BI .

Custom visuals

If you receive a report with a visual you don't recognize, and you don't see it included in the full list of visualizations included with Power BI , likely it's a custom visual . Custom visuals are created by Power BI community members and submitted to Power BI for use in reports.

These collections of dashboards and reports organize related content together into a single package. Power BI designers build them in workspaces and share apps with individuals, groups, entire organizations, or the public. As a business user , you can be confident that you and your colleagues are working with the same information; a single trusted version of the truth.

Sometimes, the app's workspace itself is shared, and there can be many people collaborating and updating both the workspace and the app. The extent of what you can do with an app is determined by the permissions and access you're given.

The use of apps requires a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, or for the app workspace to be stored in Premium capacity. Learn about licenses .

Apps are easy to find and install in the Power BI service and on your mobile device. After you install an app, you don't have to remember the names of a lot of different dashboards and reports. They're all together in one app, in your browser, or on your mobile device.

This app has two dashboards and two reports that make up a single app. Selecting an arrow to the right of a report name displays a list of the pages that make up that report.

Whenever the app is updated, you automatically see the changes. Also, the designer controls the schedule for how often Power BI refreshes the data. You don't need to worry about keeping it up-to-date.

You can get apps in a few different ways:

The app designer can install the app automatically in your Power BI account.

The app designer can send you a direct link to an app.

You can search from within the Power BI service for apps available to you from your organization or from the community. You can also visit Microsoft AppSource , where you find all the apps that you can use.

In Power BI on your mobile device, you can only install apps from a direct link, and not from AppSource. If the app designer installs the app automatically, you see it in your list of apps.

Once you install the app, just select it from your Apps list and choose which dashboard or report to open and explore first.

Now that you have an understanding of the building blocks that make up the Power BI service for business users, continue learning using these links. Or, start using the Power BI service with some sample data.

Related content

Review and bookmark the Glossary

Take a tour of the Power BI service

Read the overview of Power BI written especially for business users

Watch a video that reviews the basic concepts and gives a tour of the Power BI service.

This video might use earlier versions of Power BI Desktop or the Power BI service.

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