Power BI team recently added the functionality to export Power BI reports to PowerPoint (in Preview). The feature does not go very far though, in that, you cannot interact with the reports or dashboards in the ppt. However, there has been a way to bring in your dashboards and reports into PowerPoint and Excel while maintaining their interactivity using a lesser known app. In this blog, I will share the steps to use that add-in and some of its advantages and limitations.
The biggest advantage is, of course, the interactivity, while maintaining the flow of the presentation and not switching out of the presentation to go to the dashboard and back.
You can set a specific tile as the default tile on a slide when you are connected to a dashboard. All you need to do is save and exit with a tile showing on a slide, then you will see the same tile on that slide when you open the presentation again. If you wanted to, you could embed the dashboard multiple times on multiple slides showing different tiles, then annotate each one separately to talk about the key points on each.
The add-in can connect to both reports and dashboards, so you can navigate through the tiles of the dashboard as well as the pages of the report.
Only the tiles on the dashboards are visible. When you are trying to view a dashboard that has a live page pinned to it, the live pages do not show up on PowerPoint.
When you are connected to the report, the report page and filter settings in the PowerPoint will always be the default report page and settings you would have seen when you logged in to Power BI. I tried saving the .ppt with two different report pages on two different slides, but it defaulted to the same page when I opened the PowerPoint file again.
There is an option to show a visual (a tile or a report page) as a saved image, which is great if you want to prepare your presentation around specific data or images that you do not want to change or refresh before your talk, but then you lose the ability to refresh the visual.
And finally, here’s how you make your presentations more attractive!
1. Open your PowerPoint presentation. Click on “Insert” in the top bar.
2. Click on “Store”.
3. Under Office Add-ins, click on “STORE”. Once you get this add-in, you will find it under ‘MY ADD-INS’.
4. Type “Power BI” in the search box and search.
5. Add the “Power BI Tiles” add-in.
6. Click on the “From Power BI” button.
7. Enter your credentials to access your Power BI site.
8. Navigate to the workspace – personal or group, where the desired dashboards and reports are present.
9. If you want to connect to a dashboard, click on the dashboard name. If you want to connect to a report, click on “Reports” next to “Dashboards”.
10. Your dashboard tile appears on the slide!, as you see!
11. You can resize it and/or click on the arrows in the middle to navigate through the tiles.
12. You can also bring in a report and scroll through the pages while interacting with the slicers and filters.
13. To show a visual as a static image, click on the tile or report, then expand the arrow near the top on the right side of the visual.
14. Select “Show as Saved Image” in the list of options. The visual will be converted to an image.
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