What is published a report in Power Bi?
Introduction
Microsoft Power BI is a flexible business intelligence system with various parts, including Power BI Desktop for data import, preparation, report creation, and visualization. Additionally, it allows for the sharing of reports after they are created. In this reading, you’ll explore an overview of Power BI reports and discover what is shared during publication.
Power BI reports
In Power BI, you create reports to visualize and share insights. Since Power BI Desktop can’t be installed on various devices like mobiles and tablets, you need a place to host your reports for sharing, as Power BI users work with data from many different sources and devices.
Power BI provides two hosting options:
1. Power BI service, a cloud-based hosting
2. Power BI report server on-premises hosting.
Power BI Service reports and analytics
Power BI service, offered by Microsoft and integrated with Azure and Office 365, is a cloud-based platform for hosting reports. There are several reasons why you might publish your report to Power BI service.
Some of the reasons include the following:
· You need to create business dashboards.
· You want to share your reports and dashboards with various people within and outside your organization.
· You want to manage your assets and create audience-specific workspaces and apps.
However, Power BI service is more than just a platform for hosting and sharing reports; it also offers various analytical tools and features. Which are:
· Dataflows
· Shared dataset
· Datamart
· Data lineage
· Sensitivity labels
· Deployment pipelines
· Workspaces
· Apps
What is published to Power BI service?
When you publish a Power BI file from the desktop to the Power BI service, you publish the following components:
· The data tables and columns
· The data model and schema design
· Any reports and visualizations you have created in Report view.
· All DAX measures you have created in the data model.
You’ll also publish other components like:
· The reports and any semantic model (datasets) you have in the Power BI desktop will be published to Power BI service with the same name.
· If your Power BI desktop file has sensitivity labels, the reports published to Power BI service will inherit the labels.
· If your Power BI report has a Direct Query connection with an on-premises SQL Server database, you must install and configure a data gateway to access the reports from Power BI service.
When you publish a visualization to the Power BI service with a specific theme, it will retain that theme. Power BI also lets you keep this original theme or switch to the dashboard’s theme when pinning a visual element as a tile to the dashboard.
Replacing the existing file published from Power BI desktop
If you edit a report in Power BI Desktop after publishing it to Power BI service, you must publish it again to update both the report and its datasets in the service.
However, take note of the following when replacing an existing file:
· You cannot publish two models with the same name.
· If you rename or delete a column or DAX measure in your Power BI desktop file, the visualization will be broken based on these changes.
· When you make changes to a Power BI file and republish it, a message indicates the number of reports, dashboards, and workspaces impacted by the change and asks you to confirm that you want to replace the current model with a modified one.
Conclusion
Power BI service is a cloud platform for publishing, sharing, and managing Power BI content. It allows you to upload datasets, data models, DAX calculations, and report visualizations from desktop files. Besides publishing and sharing, Power BI service also supports creating dataflows, DataMart, deployment pipelines, and other development assets.
