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.
Now that our workspace is created and has users assigned, let's take a look at how content is published, imported and updated to that Power BI workspace. Most Power BI reports are created using Power BI desktop. Here we see a demonstration report that is ready to be published to the Power BI service. To do so, we must first sign in to our Power BI account. Next we'll click on the publish button located on the home tab. This initiates the process of sending our Power BI report and accompanying data model to the Power BI service.
Next Power BI desktop will ask us if we want to save our report changes. Once we do, we'll then be asked to select the workspace we would like to publish the report to. On this list, we see three workspaces, but since this is a collaborative project, we want to publish it to a workspace, where others will also have access, which in this example is called sample workspace. Power BI will then upload the report to the service while showing us a publishing dialog box. Depending on the size of the report and internet connection, this process can take seconds to sometimes over an hour.
Once the process has been completed, a success notification appears, and we can close the dialog box. If we visit the workspace, we can now see the report and corresponding dataset appear there. All Power BI reports will be linked to a corresponding dataset, whether at the individual report level, as this report is, or at a shared data set level, which is when one data model serves as the foundation for many reports. Power BI desktop is the preferred tool for building reports and should be utilized in most development scenarios. However, there are other elements and methods available to us for adding content to a Power BI workspace. Let's take a look at a few.
Each workspace has a button marked new, which provides a list of content that we can create. Here we can see it is possible to originate a report and data set from the workspace directly. As mentioned before, although this is possible, it is still preferred to use Power BI desktop as this provides an easier development environment and serves as a backup once the report is published. If we wanted to import a Power BI file from our computer, we could also do that from the last option on this list. This import method can also be used for other file types, such as Excel, paginated reports and CSV files.
There are also elements in this menu that only exist in the Power BI service. These include dashboards, which allow us to combine visual elements from multiple reports in a single page story. These visuals can summarize report findings and also act as a hyperlink to the actual report page. Additionally, we can create dataflows, which are the online version of power query. Dataflows allow us to create and reuse common data transformations and will serve as source tables for our future reports. Paginated reports are typically created from the Power BI report builder tool and require premium capacity to view. Scorecards allow us to track progress across Power BI goals that might have been created.
Last we have streaming datasets, which allow for near-real-time reporting on high throughput data elements. We can also originate Power BI content from the Get Data tab located on the bottom left of the Power BI service window. Similar options appear to us as we move through that flow. It's important to point out that users wishing to publish content to a workspace must have either a pro or premium per user license. These are requirements regardless of whether our organization is using premium capacity or not. If we try to publish content to a Power BI workspace that already contains an existing report or data set of the same name, we will get a warning alert that content already exists and ask for our permission to replace it. This will overwrite the previously published content and the dialog box shows us a count of the workspace content that might be impacted by this change.
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.