Integrating Power BI Tiles into Office documents
In this guest blog Rui Romano of DevScope will walk you through an application that he built that allow you to insert PowerBI visualizations into Office documents.Take it away Rui:
We built an Office 365 App (now called Add-Ins) called “PowerBI Tiles” to integrate PowerBI tiles/visualizations into office documents (ex: PowerPoint, Excel) in only three simple steps:
1. Insert the “PowerBI Tiles” application into an office document:
2. Click at the login button and authenticate with your Power BI credentials at the shown popup:
Note: The credentials are not saved by the application/service
3. Select the Dashboard and the desired PowerBI tile:
And that’s it, you have a “refreshable” PowerBI visualization inside your PowerPoint presentation.
To add another visualization just copy & paste the app and build awesome dashboards in PowerPoint :-), like this:
Some usability tips:
- Groups are supported (PowerBI Pro required), select the Group at the top of the select dashboard step:
- All the app buttons appear when you mouse-over the following locations:
- To refresh a tile right-click inside the visualization and select the “Reload” option:
- If you want to share the document with another person that doesn’t have the “PowerBI Tiles” application installed don’t worry, just check the “Show as Saved Image” option in the context menu:
Before saying goodbye a few behind the scenes how the application was built:
- Built using Visual Studio 2015
- Takes advantage of the awesome new REST API’s: Dashboards & Tiles
https://api.powerbi.com/beta/myorg/dashboards
https://api.powerbi.com/beta/myorg/dashboards/<dashboardId>/tiles
- The visualizations are Iframes into a Power BI url that is provided by the “/tiles” REST API and uses a postMessage to authenticate, for example:
- All the requests to the PowerBI service are made client-side in javascript (PowerBI REST APIs are CORS enabled)
And that’s it! Hope you enjoy the app… Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Rui Romano
