Pinning a Live Page

>> We've seen how you can use data that's in Excel workbooks to drive the reports and dashboards that you build in Power BI. But you can also use content from your Excel workbooks, so tables, pivot tables, charts, that sort of thing, in your Power BI dashboards as well. There are two ways to do this. One, you can actually upload your workbook up to the Power BI service, and then work with the Excel sheets right there, or you can use an add-in to Excel and publish individual bits of content up to your Power BI dashboards. I'll show you how both of those work. So I'm here on the Power BI dashboard I've already created.

And you can see the Reports and Dashboards that I've already created using Power BI. But I'm actually gonna upload some Excel content as well. So I'm gonna choose Get Data, hit Files and I'm gonna just browse to my Excel file. I could have done this by connecting to SharePoint or OneDrive library as well. And you will see that I get two different options when I connect to Excel. Import Excel data into Power BI or Upload the Excel file as it is. I'm gonna choose that second option. And you'll see a slight difference when this report gets uploaded. Over here on the left-hand side, you'll see, I get little Excel icon next to the name of the report.

And that means that I'm working with the Excel spreadsheet itself within Power BI here. So I can see the actual Excel grid just as if I was working in Excel online, in fact I'm really working in Excel online here. So I can see that same table. I've got the pivot table report that I created, I even see Power BI content et cetera as well. But I'm just gonna use this spreadsheet as an example. What I can actually do is highlight a range of cells here or I could select a chart if I had that in here, I could select individual cells or a range or a whole chart.

And up in the right-hand corner, you'll see this option to pin it. And I can actually pin that entire range that entire selection onto a dashboard straight from this Excel spreadsheet.

Let's go back to dashboard.

And you can see here, there's a tile that I've just created pinned from exactly the same range of data straight out of that Excel workbook. And as you'd expect, if I re-upload that Excel workbook and the data changes, this tile on this dashboard is gonna get updated and changes as well. You can see things like the details of the range exactly where it came from, which sheet it came from, some of the details in the report as well. So that's the one way of working with this, either connecting to an excel spreadsheet that's in OneDrive for business in pinning data out of it through the Power BI service.

The other way, that I can do this is from within Excel itself. So I'm gonna run Excel and open that same report. And you'll see that I've already got this add-in installed called the Power BI Publisher for Excel. And using this, I can pin data, and charts from the Excel file right up into Power BI dashboards from here within Excel.

You'll see, you have a Power BI ribbon that gets installed when you install the add-ins. And you can download the add-ins from the PowerBI.com site. So I can do exactly the same sort of thing here, I can choose to highlight a range of cells and then just hit Pin. The first thing it will do is ask me to sign in to Power BI, so I need to tell it who I am.

And now it'll ask me where I want to pin this. So I can choose from particular groups or enter my workspace, whether I want to put it on an existing dashboard or a new one. Let's pick a different dashboard, put this one on our worldwide sales dashboard. Okay, it's been successfully pinned and I've got a link here to go and open the dashboard in Power BI and view it there.

So just as before, here is my new Excel tile driven from that Excel workbook. Now, again there's a link here between this tile and the Excel workbook. So when I open that workbook again, if I refresh it, if I go into the data near the table or the data in here, I can actually refresh those tiles from here within Excel. So I have this option to open my pin manager. And you can see here, all of the things from this workbook that have been pinned. So there is particular range here that I've just pinned. If I selected other things, I'd see those in here as well.

And I can update it and that just takes a snapshot of whatever is in my workbook again and send it back up to Power BI. Let's take another look at another example. So here, I'm gonna insert a Pivot Chart based on the same data, create a little stacked column chart maybe, and I can see I'm looking at units sold by different manufacturers now. And if I do things like highlighting or changing the filters, so I select a particular date range in this case, those filters will get applied when I pinned this up as well. So we go back to Power BI, I've got this chart pinned, selected rather.

So when I pin this, it will be that that appears in the tile. I'm gonna pop that up onto the same dashboard… Back over to that dashboard. And here you go. So I can see here exactly the same chart and the same table that I had before. When I go back to that pin manager, you'll see now I've got that range and the chart so I can see there's two different things.

So if I had multiple different sheets here with lots of different elements, different ranges that are all being pinned into this dashboard, it'll be really easy for me to open this pin manger so I can see all of the different elements that have been pinned onto different dashboards in my Power BI workspace. So that's everything that I can do with the Excel add-in. So I can take ranges, I can take visuals, and I can pin those up onto my Power BI dashboards and work with those just as if it was data and visualizations that came from any other data source.