You must have come across people talking about Power BI Apps sooner or later. But, many people wonder what the term “Power BI Apps” actually means and the purpose of its existence in the Power BI tool. Power BI apps are widely used and adopted for creating and sharing reports.
Power BI Apps are a way of sharing content with the end-users. The already existing method of sharing content in Power BI is limited. But, the Power BI App extends on already existing methods for sharing content with withing and outside organizations. You can choose to share the content with the entire organization of just a few bunches of people.
Power BI Content sharing Methods –
Apart from Power BI Apps there are mainly six methods to share content in Power BI
- Publish to web
- Embed In SharePoint Online
- Power BI content Packs
- Power BI Embedded
- WordSpace in Power BI
- Simple dashboard sharing
Power BI Apps are the most recent methods adopted by Microsoft to share the content.
Advantages of Power BI Apps –
Power BI apps come with advantages for developers and end-users. They both get a separate environment. The developers can edit the Power BI content with their team for better collaborations and end-user get the environment to consume the data or reports. Hence, the end-users can only view the content and developers can edit the content as well.
With Power Bi Apps, you get the ability to share multiple dashboards, reports and datasets all in same time. This results in benefits of less maintenance compared to working with multiple dashboards and maintenance.
You can integrate the Power BI Apps with Azure B2B services and get ability for external sharing. It comes handy when you want to share the content with people outside your company.
Power Bi Apps and reports can also be integrated with Microsoft Teams for better collaboration in Teams Apps.
Let’s understand the Power BI Apps in details –
What are Power BI Apps ?
Power BI Apps are content types that integrate related two things –
Each Power BI app can have multiple reports and dashboards, all bundled together. Following Power Bi services are published in Power BI app for consumers to use –
- Related reports,
- Workbooks,
- Dashboards
- Datasets
What are Power BI App Workspace ?
In Power BI App workspace following things are saved –
- Dashboards
- Datasets
- WordBook
- Reports
Workspace is for developers and colleagues to work together for development. You have all settings available in Workspace like data refresh rate. This Workspace is often used as collaboration areas for teams to collaborate and work on content before they make the Power Bi app available for end-users for consumption.
What are Power BI Mobile App ?
Power BI mobile app is available on all the major platform for end-users to download and consumption –
- Download Power BI mobile App
The Power BI mobile app is capable of serving data from three sources.
- Power BI services
- SQL Server Reporting Services
- Power BI Report Server.
Desktop version for Power BI
Power BI desktop version is installed on the User’s laptop or desktop. The main functions of Power BI Desktop version are following –
- Generating queries,
- Working with data models
- Build relationships
- Run calculations
- Generating reports for Power BI
While implementing the Power BI first time in your organization, you should talk to Power BI experts like Power BI consultant for proper governance implementations.
However, we recommend downloading the app from the Microsoft App store as they provide automatic updates to Power BI desktop version once per month and you don’t need to Admin rights to perform the update.
What are PowerApps in Power BI
PowerApps is Office 365 feature that allows businesses to build multiple business applications for different purposes with no requirement to code to very little code. Power BI apps provide a lot of possibilities for integrations between the Power BI, PowerApps, and Flows. the ability to show multiple Power Bi reports on PowerApps or show PowerApps input to the Power Bi dashboard or trigger an alert in Power BI for flow to show custom data.
What are AppSource marketplace ?
AppSource is a marketplace to find business applications for Power BI, Office 365 Dynamics 365 and for other services provided by Microsoft.
Conclusion –
Power BI is very strong and featurefull tool when it comes to data visualization and creating reports for organizations to better understand where the business is going. It not only gives insights but determined what needs to done to keep the business running profitably. With Power BI Apps you get extra ability to work as a team and collaborate and better understand different aspects of business.