Power BI — Version Control

Source: https://www.perforce.com/blog/vcs/what-is-version-control

Intro

To control the version of your PBI dashboard you should have:

1. Power BI Desktop (Microsoft store link)
2. Git
3. GitHub account

Optional

1. GitHub Desktop
2. Visual Studio Code

To visit the repository of this post, follow this link.

In june/2023 Microsoft released an update for Power BI which (finally) brought us the version control of dashboards.

It’s called “Power BI Desktop Developer Mode”.

You could also use this new feature for CI/CD integration using Azure, but it won’t be our focus in this post. I’ll try to explain the 101 for the average user of PBI.

Power BI Developer Mode

Currently PBI Developer is in Preview Mode, to enable this new feature you should go to File > Options and settings > Options > Preview features.

Source: Microsoft

How to

I’ll consider that you have already installed everything that was mentioned in “Intro”. Directly to our topic, let’s do it together.

1. Create a local repository

Image 1 — Creating Local Repo

Open GitHub desktop, login to your account, create a local repo in “Create new repository”.

Image 2 — Creating the Repo

Select the name of the repo and its local path.

Image 3 — Publising the repo into GitHub

Publish your local repo into your GitHub account.

Now your local repository is “connected” to the GitHub’s cloud.

2. Create a Dashboard

Like this masterpiece:

Image 4 — Creating a Dashboard

Now, is where it all happens.

Click in File > Save as, go to your repo folder:

Image 5 — Saving as PBI

Assign it a name and save the file as *.pbip.

Image 6 — Github Desktop

4. Commit/Push

Image 10 — Commit and push

Now, just click over commit to main. (In case you want to commit it into the main branch) and push it.

Image 11 — GitHub

Well, there it is… all the files created by the .pbip and the .pbix wasn’t commited/pushed into our GitHub’s repo.

In case you want to see what was done in this post: IgorComune/medium_repo_test (github.com)

In the next post, I’ll describe each folder and its contents that was created by .pbip.

That’s all folks.

Igor Comune | LinkedIn

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