Publish to Power BI

From the very beginning, Power BI allows us to import Excel workbooks in two ways: as a data source or as a report. This second option is useful when we already have ready-made reports that we want to use in parallel with Power BI reports. Recently, within the Microsoft 365 subscription, the Publish to Power BI option has appeared, which enables direct publishing of reports on the Power BI service. How does this work?

Open a ready-made report, e.g. pivot that shows sales and earnings depending on the manufacturer and brand of the item. Clicking on the File tab opens the background view. Enter the Publish menu and you will see options for publishing reports on the Power BI service.

In the drop-down list, you can select a workspace when the report is published. The default value is My Workspace, however if you have a Power BI Professional license it can be another workspace. The Export option is used to retrieve data from Excel, which you will later use to create Power BI reports, and the Upload option is used to move the entire workbook “to the cloud”. This way you can view ready-made reports using the Excel Online application.

Excel will automatically publish a report to the Power BI account that is associated with your Excel (Microsoft 365) account.

There is another way to perform this. It is possible to save a workbook to the One Drive Professional repository. When you add a report from this location, it’s easier to refresh it. To refresh the data, all you have to do is edit and save the report. Since the content is automatically synchronized from the local computer and the repository in the cloud, the consequence is the refresh of the report that exists within the Power BI service.