Lab-5-5

>> Let's take a look at some of the other things that you can do with Excel content that you're managing through Power BI. I've already connected to an Excel workbook that's stored on OneDrive and you can see it here in my report section, marked with a little X I like on, this is the Fruits workbook. When I click on this, I actually get the Excel services view of the workbook right here in my Power BI session. And I can actually do things like pinning content out of this report, out of this workbook to my power BI dashboards, just like any other visuals or any other content from Power BI reports. So if I select this chart, you'll see it get's a border around the edge, and up in the top right hand corner I get a little pin button. And just the same as before, I get an option that say, you know, where would you like to pin this. Let's use the same dashboard. And I can even do this with a range of data as well from the workbook. And now if I go back to dashboard, I'll see two tiles that have been created with that same content. And I can treat these just like any other tile. Move them around, resize them. I can go and make changes to, you know, the titles and things and even change those links to change where that title takes me. By default, I'd click it and it would go back to the workbook. And you'll see that the highlighted, the workbook will have the thing that I was, I clicked through from already highlighted for me. Now a great thing about having these tiles hooked up to that Excel workbook that's sitting on OneDrive is the way that they refresh. So if I come to OneDrive and go and edit that workbook itself... I can edit it right here in the browser. And if I was to do something like add a new row into that table, so let us take another fruit like watermelon and say, yeah, we sold another 10 of these or 11 of these. You'll see everything in the Excel workbook updates, because we're working on Excel online, it automatically get saved. Now it'll take a few minutes, this happens on a schedule. But eventually these tiles in Power BI will also update. Because they're connected live to the workbook, after about six or ten minutes, this will update as well. Now I'm not going to sit here and wait for it, but let's come back in a few minutes and see that thing having updated. And that refresh into the Power BI tiles happens about every six to ten minutes. There's a little bit of a delay but you'll see these tiles automatically update and the data will come straight through into your Power BI dashboards. As well as using Excel workbooks that are sitting on OneDrive, you can actually publish and pin Excel content right from within Excel itself. As a Power BI publisher for Excel add-in that you can download from Power BI site. Let's take a look at how that works. So I'm already using Excel here and I've got the Power BI add-in installed. You can see it just adds a new ribbon. And the first thing will happen when you run this is it will ask you to sign in. Now I'm using Amanda's e-mail address here so we can publish it up to the same place. But you can see that this add-in just allows me to pin content right from here up to a Power BI dashboard. So I can either select a range, and if I choose a table like this, it will actually identify the table object as well. So as more rows get added to this that will automatically be, or you can refresh that into Power BI straight away. Or I can select an object and pin that as well. When I hit pin, I'll get the same sort of experience as I do when pinning in the website as well. I can choose what dashboard to send it to. I am going to stick with this custom profitability one. And then I get a little notification saying it's been successfully pinned. And I can even view it there within Power BI. So I'll click that and it will send me back up. And here's the rather large... Let's back out a little bit, tile of my dashboard. So the other thing I can do within this Excel add-in, if I've pinned multiple things, I can actually use the pin manager here to see all of the different bits of content, all of the different elements from within this workbook that I've pinned up to, up to Power BI. So if you imagine I've got an Excel workbook that's got lots and lots of different tabs in it. For example if I've received a workbook from a colleague, I'm sure many people get reports sent to them from different teams around their organization. If you just want to go and share that content somewhere else through Power BI, you can use this to choose the elements you want, pin them up to the Power BI dashboard, and then share them as you would do with any other content around your organization. The other great thing this pin manager does is it gives you things like the links to the individual dashboards and then you've got this update option as well. So I can select one of these and say update it. And now if I've changed any of the elements in the Excel workbook or I refresh the data and it's pulled into the Excel workbook, when I hit this update button, it will change, it will take that element again and push it back up to Power Bi. So I've got this seamless way of refreshing and updating that content as well. So that's a bit of an overview, the sort of things that you can do with Excel content within Power BI, either things that are stored on OneDrive or even right from Excel on your desktop.