Microsoft just announced and released a new Power BI publish to web preview feature, this allows you to share and publish your interactive data visualizations to a (public) website or blog.

The great thing about this, is that you can embed your reports to your own web platform either internally, to colleagues, or externally, to clients and customers. So basically all (anonymous) users can view your report online. Off course there are also ways of embedding the reports in systems where proper security permissions are in place, for example your SharePoint Online or other intranet environment.

How easy is it to publish a Power BI report to the web?

The report you can view below is a live report that is generated via Power BI. It shows the population by State & State code. Use the interactive filters and the data visualisation will come to live!

How can I accomplish this? It’s really easy and only a few clicks away. First your website or blog needs to support iframe html tags, an inline frame is used to embed another Power BI report within your own webpage. Follow these steps to publish your Power BI to the web:

1. Navigate to your Power BI environment and select a report that you want to publish;
2. Click File and a set of different options will appear;
3. Click Publish to web (embed this report for public access by anyone on the Internet);

4. Use the link so you can share your report via E-Mail;
5. Copy the HTML and paste it into your blog or website (or other supported environment);

How to embed a Power BI report into PowerPoint?

There are scenario’s where viewing reports in Power BI is not the preffered delivery format. For example if you want to give a presentation of your data to your stakeholders or distributing it to external customers.

There is a free Microsoft Add-in for Office called “Web Viewer”, this allows you to load your Power BI report into an Office product. This has a full refresh and interactive report functionality that you are used to in Power BI.

I can view my Sales performance, based on CRM Online data, in PowerPoint. 

I can view see the population numbers of America, based on an open data repository. 

Please follow the steps below to embed a Power BI report into your PowerPoint presentation:

1. Open up a PowerPoint presentation and navigate to the Store;
2. Search for Web Viewer and follow the prompts in order to install the add-in;
3. Load the add-in and paste in your Power BI publish to web report URL;

Next steps to improve the publish to web capability

Currently the Power BI publish to web capability is in preview, so a great opportunity for Microsoft to get some community feedback in order to improve the new feature. After playing around with it I found a few pros and cons:

Pros 

• Easy and fast to share a report with everyone in the world;
• Embed reports into your own website without having to sign in to your account;
• Report data will stay up-to-date according to your preconfigured refresh schedule;
• Offers the same interactive Power BI user experience;

Cons

• Admin Security model, A Power BI user now has the ability to share confidential data outside the organization by simply bypassing a warning message. This presents a risk leaking sensitive information. Managing and disabling this feature per user should be a prerequisite;
• Details on pricing and usage limits, but it’s only in preview so this is understandable!

Open your world of new possibilities

This new possibility was high on the requested feature list so I am really happy that the Microsoft Power BI Team has been working quickly to deliver this. It’s really great to see that the requested feature is finally here!

Stay tuned for more real-life cases from my customers soon, regarding the new Power BI publish to web feature!