Create Power BI Reports from Excel Files Stored in SharePoint Online Team Sites

As part of recent Power BI service update the ability to use excel files stored in SharePoint Online team sites was announced. This blog post explains the steps for creating Power BI report from excel file stored in SharePoint online tea site

1.       Logon to PowerBi.com

2.       Click on Get Data from left navigation

3.       In the Get Data page click Get link in the files source

4.       In the files page click SharePoint – Team Sites as the source

5.       You will be prompted to enter the URL of the SharePoint site. Enter the URL of the SharePoint site like https://contoso.sharepoint.com/teams/sales and click Connect button.

6.       You will be presented from the list of libraries to choose from. Click the library in which you have excel file to be used for Power BI. If you have the file within a folder then select the folder.

7.       List of Excel files in the library or folder will be listed. Select the Excel file you want to use as source and click the Connect button at top right.

8.       From the Choose how to connect page click Import button in Import Excel data into Power BI option

9.       After processing your Excel file Power BI will create a new data set.

10.   You will then be create charts and dashboards from the data set created from Excel file.

Creating your first Power BI Visualization Dashboard

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud based BI service allows us to create and share reports and data visualization from variety of data sources on any device. The service which was previously available only in the US region is now available worldwide. In this blog we will see how to create a simple visualization in Power BI using excel sheet as Data Source.

Below are the series of steps that have to be taken to create a Power BI visualization

1.       Create a excel data source. For example create a products sheet with Product, Quarter, Revenue, Units Sold columns and enter data for few rows. Select the rows and create a table.

 

2.       Sign in to Power BI , if you don’t have an account sign up for free using your official email.

3.       In the Power BI designer click ‘+’ sign next to the Datasets menu in left navigation pane.

 

4.       You will be taken to Get Data page. On this page click Excel Workbook in the left navigation and then click Connect button

 

5.       Choose the location as computer and Browse to the location where we have saved the excel workbook with table and click Connect button

6.       A new dashboard will be created with the selected excel work book.

7.       Click on the dashboard from the left navigation pane and then click source to create a new visualization.

 

8.       On the visualization page select the fields you want in the visualization for example Product and Units sold fields. The Visualization will be displayed on the screen.

 

9.       Save the report by clicking the Save menu from top and give a name to the report.

10.       Select the visualization to by clicking on it and then click the Pin button on the right to pin the visualization to the dashboard.

11.   Click on the dashboard name from the top to go back to the dashboard. You will see that the visualization has been added to the dashboard.

 

 

12.   Q&A feature in Power BI allows us to explore data through natural language queries and get answers in the form charts. We can create a variety of  Q&A like for example “show products sold more than 2500 in q2”

12.   Visualizations created from Q&A can be pinned to the dashboard.

13.   Dashboards can be easily shared with your colleagues by simply clicking the Share icon and specifying the email addresses of colleagues with whom the report has to be shared.

 

 

Power BI is easy and intuitive to use BI tool that allows us to create, share and access reports and visualizations just using a browser.