This course is designed to lead users through the experience of working with Power BI content in the Power BI service. This web-enabled environment is where content creators and business users go to develop, deploy, and consume content. This course will walk through the process of creating Power BI workspaces in this environment, provisioning user roles, and publishing content to these spaces. It will also walk through the steps necessary to make that content available to a larger business audience by developing workspace apps.
Content in Power BI is also constantly iterated upon, and this course will establish best practices for development lifecycle strategy and the use of premium features like deployment pipelines. Once Power BI content is deployed, it must also be accessible and discoverable. This course will examine processes for promoting and certifying Power BI content and configuring subscriptions so that content can be emailed to users at a defined frequency.
Learning Objectives
- Create a Power BI workspace
- Assign workspace roles
- Publish a Power BI desktop file
- Create a workspace app
- Create a dashboard in a workspace
- Certify a dataset
- Configure a subscription
Intended Audience
This course is designed for individuals who are working with Power BI and those studying for Microsoft’s Power BI Certification assessment.
Prerequisites
To get the most from this course, you should have reasonable experience working with Power BI. If you're new to Power BI, we recommend taking our Introduction to Power BI course.
We are going to talk a little bit about creating and configuring a workspace in Power BI. First, we want to understand a little bit about what the purpose of Power BI workspaces are. Workspaces are intended to be collaborative environments, places where team members can save Power BI reports and provide a secure access layer for them to reach this Power BI content online. This means that only those that have access to that workspace can visit and view that content. It also allows for content to be shared, deployed, and reviewed securely online.
It should be clear that Power BI workspaces only exist online in the Power BI service. They are not something that we would find or create in Power BI desktop and only exist as part of the Power BI web portal. Each workspace provides 10 gigabytes of storage. They can also be linked to OneDrive or, in some cases, Azure Data Lake Storage. In general, workspaces should be considered for development activities only, such as when we're collaborating on a new Power BI report and getting them to a place where they're ready to be deployed across an organization.
There are two kinds of workspaces that exist in Power BI. The first type is known as My workspace, which is also called a personal workspace. These should only be used for ad hoc reporting and projects that aren't intended for any kind of distribution. The other type of workspace, which is the main workspace of Power BI, are called App workspaces or simply workspaces. These are used to maintain and secure Business Reports and Power BI assets, and we'll see them appear on the workspace panel once we start adding them to our Power BI tenant.
To create an app workspace, first enter the Power BI service by logging into Power BI at powerbi.com. The ability to create a workspace must be provisioned by your Power BI administrator. This is generally turned on by default and, if so, we'll see a button at the bottom of the workspace panel that says Create a workspace. Click on that button. On the next screen, we can create a name for the workspace, upload a picture, and add a description. If the name we've selected is available, it will show that it is and activate the Save button at the bottom.
When creating a workspace, we have a couple of options for assigning a license type to it. There are currently four license types available to be linked to a workspace. The first license type is Pro, which is the standard license required for most Power BI development work. A Premium Per User license allows us to enable premium capacity for content in that workspace and can only be accessed by other users with a Premium Per User license. Premium Per Capacity is the standard license for enterprise deployments in Power BI and allows users with a free license to interact with content in that workspace. The last license type is the Embedded type, which enables Power BI content to be hosted on a custom application outside the Power BI web portal. Once we've saved our workspace, it will appear on the workspace panel in the Power BI portal. At this point, we can start adding and saving content to it.
Steve is an experienced Solutions Architect with over 10 years of experience serving customers in the data and data engineering space. He has a proven track record of delivering solutions across a broad range of business areas that increase overall satisfaction and retention. He has worked across many industries, both public and private, and found many ways to drive the use of data and business intelligence tools to achieve business objectives. He is a persuasive communicator, presenter, and quite effective at building productive working relationships across all levels in the organization based on collegiality, transparency, and trust.