How to Share Reports in Power BI for Mobile

Power BI for Mobile is a touch-optimized Windows 8 app for a tablet. By using this app, you can view any workbook saved to Office 365.

Preparing a workbook for mobile viewing

Power BI for Mobile does not display a workbook in the same way that SharePoint Online does. Instead, it displays a workbook as a set of related pages with one item to a page. An item is a Power View report, a Pivot Table, a chart, a PivotChart, or a table. A named range is also an item that is displayed on a separate page, except that other items appearing within the range appear on the same page. You determine which items are displayed online by opening the File tab in Excel, selecting Info, and then clicking Browser View Options. In the Browser View Options dialog box, you can select Sheets or Items in the drop-down list. If you choose Sheets, you can choose to display only Power View reports.

The only control you have over the sequencing of pages is to use a naming convention. Power BI for Mobile displays all items except Power View reports alphabetically by name. Then it displays the Power View reports in the order in which they appear in the workbook.

Important To be visible in the POWER BI for Mobile app, your workbook item or sheet must be based on the Excel Data Model in a workbook hosted in Office 365, a Windows Azure SQL Database, or an O Data feed. An item or sheet based on any other type of data source will be displayed as a blank page.

Using Power BI for Mobile

When you open the Power BI for Mobile app, swipe up to display the app bar, tap Browse, and then, on the Locations page, swipe up to show the app bar. In the box, type the URL for your SharePoint Online site, and then tap the Go arrow to the right of the URL. You must provide a user name and password to browse your workbooks. Navigate to Shared Documents, and then tap a report. Once a report is open, you can swipe up at any time to access the app bar, where you can tag a report as a favorite or use the Reset To Original button to restore the report to its original state and refresh the data. In addition, you can see thumbnail images of the report, as shown in Figure 5.8, so that you can easily jump to a different page.

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The Power BI for Mobile app is designed for an interactive touch experience with the following features in mind for Power View:

 Highlight In a Power View sheet, tap a chart element such as a bar, column, or legend item to bring the selected DATA into view. The other data is displayed with a more subdued hue to help you see the ratio between the two subsets of data. Clear the selection by tapping the chart background. You can select multiple items for highlighting by tapping the icon with three bars in the upper-right corner of the chart.

 Filter For any item that has a filter defined, tap the filter icon in the upper-right corner to open the filter pane. You can change filter values and clear the filters, but you cannot add or delete a filter.

 Zoom You can pinch and expand your fingers on the tablet’s surface to zoom out or in, respectively. However, this technique currently works only on Excel items and not on Power View sheets.

 Sort a table column To sort, tap the column heading in an Excel item. Swipe labels on the horizontal axis of a Power View column chart or the vertical axis on a bar chart.

 Drill You can double-click a field to drill down to the next level of a hierarchy (if one is defined in the data model). Click the Drill Up arrow to return to the previous level.

As long as you leave the Power BI for Mobile app open, the filter and sort selections you have applied remain intact. However, when you close the app, the filter and sort selections are removed.

Sharing a report from Power BI for Mobile

To share a report that you are viewing in the Power BI for Mobile app, swipe from the right, click Share, and then type the email recipient’s address. The app sends an email message containing a link to the report rather than the page you are viewing. The recipient can use one of two links to view the report, but only if the recipient already has permission to view the report in SharePoint Online. The MOBILE BI link connects the user to the report in the Power BI for Mobile app, and the HTTPS link opens the report in a browser window using the Excel Web App.

Power BI Administration

Power BI is a collection of features and services to help you display content like Excel workbooks, charts, and reports through a different UI, if you wish, but also gives you some other options such as scheduled data refreshes, access to on-premises data, and the ability to create, and manage connections to data sources to help ensure everyone uses the same data source for reporting.

POWER BI FOR OFFICE 365 includes an administrative infrastructure that you manage through the Power BI Admin Center. To access the Power BI Admin Center, if you are a member of the Admin group, click the Power BI Admin Center link on the Tools menu (gear icon) in the upper-right corner of a Power BI site. From a standard SharePoint Online site, click the Power BI link on the Admin menu in the upper-right corner. This centralized portal for administrative tasks allows you to perform the following tasks:

 Monitor system health The system_health session is an Extended Events session that is included by default with SQL SERVER. This session starts automatically when the SQL Server Database Engine starts and runs without any noticeable performance effects.

Use the Gateway page to review a list of existing gateways and their current status. A gateway is a mechanism that securely connects Power BI to an on-premises data source and runs as a client agent on an on-premises computer. When you use this page to set up a new gateway, you download the gateway client, install it locally, and then register the gateway with a key provided in the Power BI Admin Center. You can also use this page to regenerate the key for an existing gateway or to enable the cloud credential store for the gateway so that you can quickly restore the gateway on another computer if the current gateway fails.

Configure data sources The data source can be a user data source or a system data source.

Use the Data Sources page to review a list of existing on-premises data sources and their current status. You can edit, delete, or test the connection for an existing data source. When you edit the data source, you specify whether it is enabled for cloud access, which means workbooks with this data source can be refreshed in SharePoint Online, and whether it is enabled as an O Data feed that users can access by using Power Query. You also use the Data Sources page to add a new data source, optionally enable it for cloud access or an O Data feed, assign it to a gateway, and specify the connection properties or provide a connection string. Currently, only SQL Server and Oracle are supported as data source types.

Define security for administrative roles Use the Role Management page to add members to the Admin group, which grants permission to access the Power BI Admin Center, or to the Data Steward group, which grants permission to certify queries for use in Power Query.

Specify settings for Power BI Use the Settings page to configure general settings such as whether to display top users in the usage analytics dashboard or to enable Windows authentication for O Data when it feeds the Microsoft Online Directory

Synchronization Tool is configured. You can also define the recipients of email notifications and specify whether any of the following events trigger a notification: the expiration of a gateway, the release of a new version of the Data Management Gateway client, or an indexing failure for an O Data feed.

List of Related Microsoft Certification Courses:

SSIS	SQL Server
SSRS	SQL Server DBA
SSAS	Team Foundation Server
SCCM	BizTalk Server
SharePoint	BizTalk Server Administrator