(cheerful music)
- Up next, we look at updates to Microsoft Power BI
that make it even easier for anyone to find and use it
through native installation with the Microsoft 365 apps
as well as new experiences that light up,
such as direct report sharing,
whether you're in OneDrive or SharePoint.
We'll also demonstrate the new multiple audiences capability
for internal users to share insights
to specific people within their organization,
all from a single workspace,
and the new cross-tenant dataset sharing capabilities
that greatly simplifies external sharing
and collaboration with people outside your organization.
And to walk us through all of these updates,
I'm joined by Mohammad Ali from the Microsoft Power BI team.
Mohammad, welcome to Mechanics.
- Thanks so much, Ben.
It's a great pleasure to be here.
- So from our last deep dive on Power BI,
we really focused on the AI-driven insights
as well as integration with Microsoft's analytics stack.
Now, if you miss that show, you can watch it
at aka.ms/PowerBIAIMechanics.
Now, one of the things we highlighted at the time
was the work being done to make Power BI capabilities
more discoverable through the apps that you use every day.
We showed the integration between Microsoft Teams
and the new Power BI app,
and with these latest updates,
it really takes things to a next level.
- Yes, Ben, they really do.
So not only are we making it easier to collaborate reports
and datasets as you work in your favorite
Microsoft 365 apps,
but it's now a lot easier to share and work together
on reports inside your organization,
and it's easier than ever to share datasets
and reports securely outside your organization,
all while using any device with your data.
- And it really is a natural evolution,
and it's great to see that Power BI is now natively included
and can be installed with the Microsoft 365 apps,
which means it can also be deployed by IT
right alongside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and more.
- Right, it makes things a lot easier for IT
to deploy Power BI to everyone in the organization
and also keep it up to date.
And this signals an even deeper integration
with Microsoft 365 experiences as you work,
most recently in areas like native integration
with PowerPoint where you can embed live,
fully interactive Power BI reports
directly into your presentation,
and interact with the visuals and slice and dice
as you present to others.
Or as you offer emails, being able to find
and add Power BI content directly into Outlook emails
as interactive adaptive cards.
And this level of integration is designed
to complement the way you typically work,
so much so that we're also bringing experiences
you may be used to in Microsoft 365
directly inside Power BI.
So for example, a lot of Excel users
rely heavily on contextual on-object controls.
These are designed to help you edit objects
such as text and visuals quickly
so you don't have to search for these controls.
They're just there front and center
as part of your authoring experience.
For example, I'll click on this chart,
and by clicking on the plus sign
I can easily add chart elements like axes
and chart title really quickly.
So now we're bringing the same type of on-object controls
directly to Power BI.
So back in Power BI you'll see
I have almost the exact same visual.
You'll see the on-object controls
and just like I did in Excel,
I'll add the title and both axes in Power BI as well.
And look how much easier this is
and how much the speeds up the authoring process for me.
- Which is really useful and helps keep things familiar
as you're moving from Excel to Power BI.
Now, you mentioned improving
the internal sharing capabilities.
Does this mean better support for OneDrive and SharePoint?
- Yes, absolutely.
So one of the big things we're doing
is to make it so that you can preview and interact
with Power BI report files
directly inside OneDrive and SharePoint,
and even share them with others.
Let me give you an early look at this experience.
So the third thing I'm going to show you
is how I can share the report that I just authored
using OneDrive,
and I can now do this all natively inside Power BI desktop.
Once I start the sharing process,
just like in any other Office application,
I'll save the file to OneDrive first.
So I'll do just that.
I'll call it Retail Management and hit confirm.
Now that I've saved it, the other thing I can do is go ahead
and share it with you, Ben.
So I'll go ahead and create a copy link
using the share action.
And from there you can use whatever app
you prefer to share the link with.
So I like using Teams for this,
so I'm going to pass it via Teams to you, Ben.
- Okay, great, here it is.
Now on my desktop I have the Teams chat open,
and there's that Power BI link you shared with me.
Now, in my case, I don't have the Power BI app installed,
but that's okay.
Once I click the link, it takes me
straight to OneDrive in the browser,
which you can see by the white bar of controls at the top.
Now, what I'm going to do here
is I'm going to go ahead and preview the report,
and I can even interact with it.
I'm going to go and filter this chart down to February
to show sales for that month,
and I can look at other pages
that are available to me as well.
So I'm going to open up this product analysis page,
which is looking good,
and you can see it's a fully functional experience.
And again, I didn't need to go to powerbi.com
or use the Power BI app
even though I'm working with a PBIX file.
- Right, and also in the future you'll be able to edit
the Power BI files directly inside OneDrive
and SharePoint as well.
- Right, and this is great news
for Microsoft 365 users in particular.
Of course, if you have more than just a single report
that you want to share,
Power BI Pro and Premium users
can leverage the Apps capability
where you can then group and collaborate on related content
by sharing them and publishing them as an app.
- Yes, so this is a great way to share
collections of Power BI content easily.
Not only are we improving the experience
of creating Power BI apps,
but if you have different consumers of the app
inside your organization,
you can now use a single app
and manage what each person sees
with a new capability called "multiple audiences."
That means you don't need to create
a multiple workspace by audience.
You can now achieve this using a single workspace
with a super set of reports and share exactly what you want
tailored to each audience,
all without duplicating data or reports
and preserving the single source of truth.
So let me show you how this works.
So I have an app here with reports and related assets
that is used by our sales, finance, and leadership teams.
In fact, as part of the updated experience,
you can now preview the content and add links to websites
directly in the app authoring experience.
I'm going to click on the leadership report
which has all the key metrics the leadership team
need to track sales pipeline for the organization.
Now, I only want the leadership team
to be the only ones to see this,
and not the sales and finance teams.
In the past, I've had to create separate workspaces
with different reports for each group,
but now it's much easier to do this within a single app.
Let's head over to the new audience tab
where and create and manage audience groups
within my Power BI app.
You can see here that I have already defined
the sales team and finance team.
I can see that the sales team
can only see the sales team reports.
When I head over to the finance team,
I can see that the finance group
can only see the finance reports,
but now I would like to create one for the leadership team.
So I'll create a new audience called leadership,
and now I'll customize
which reports are visible to this audience.
So I'll keep the leadership sales pipeline
and hide all the other irrelevant reports.
Next, I'll share this with you,
as you're a member of the leadership team group,
and hit update.
Ben, why don't you show us the experience from your side?
- Okay, let's do this.
Now back in Teams, I'm going to go ahead
and click on the app link,
and I can only see the reports
based on my access and permissions
as well as the chart that you shared
and scoped to my audience group.
I'm going to look at the sales team now
and I can see three reports.
I see all sales team and the leadership tabs
based on my permissions
since I'm a member of multiple audiences.
So it's a lot easier now to manage
what insights are getting shared
as you collaborate internally,
but how are you making easier for people to work externally?
- So we've released a new capability
called cross-tenant data sharing.
So this lets you share datasets with external organizations
like business partners and customers and vendors
in an easy, quick, and secure manner.
Let me start by showing you the sharing experience.
So I'm in my tenant here and I want to share a dataset
with an external user.
As a dataset owner in this case,
I have the ability to control whether I can enable
or disable external sharing.
Once I apply that, now I'll head over to the dataset
Northwind Traders Manufacturing and I'm going to hit share.
Now, similar to OneDrive, I can enter an email address,
so I'm going to share this dataset with you
as you're a member of the Northwind Traders group.
I also have the options to control if you can modify,
further share, or build derivative content
from this dataset,
and it can even send you an email notification.
So I'm going to hit grant access
and you're ready to go, Ben.
- Okay, now this is my favorite part,
because now I get to play the data analyst
for Northwind Traders.
Now in Power BI desktop, I'm here in the data hub.
Now, first you'll see there's a new tab for external data,
and from here I can see all the datasets
that I have access to.
In fact, I'm going to go and connect to this one
that you just shared with me.
Now, it's going to go ahead and request
a direct query connection
that I'm going to go ahead and approve,
and now I can see all the associated tables.
So I'm going to go ahead and select everything in this case,
and that'll take just a second
to create a live connection to the dataset,
and now I can work using combined datasets
of both my internal and external data
to create Power BI reports the way I normally would.
- And it gets even better.
We've also made finding the Power BI reports
that have been shared with you
from an external tenant much easier.
- Right, because until now,
even if you had access to a Power BI report
from an external tenant,
finding the sharing link could be difficult.
And now it's all available right in powerbi.com.
So, here I'm in my Power BI homepage
and I can see all of my recent Power BI reports,
workspaces, and datasets.
Now, there's also a new tab called "from external orgs"
that'll show content that's been shared from other tenants
that I'm a guest of.
From here, I have my normal controls for filtering
to see the item type I want.
So there's a lot more integration
with the Microsoft 365 apps and services,
and the external sharing experience is really powerful.
Now, for everyone watching who's looking to try this out,
what should they do?
- So the good news is most of these changes
are rolling out today,
so the Power BI desktop app will appear
with the rest of your Microsoft 365 apps soon,
depending on your selected update channel,
and everything I showed you in the Power BI service
is rolling out or has recently rolled out.
And of course, you can find everything you need
at powerbi.com.
- Mohammad, thank you so much for joining us
and sharing all these great Power BI updates,
and thank you for joining us as well,
and be sure to subscribe to Mechanics
for all the latest updates, and we'll see you soon.
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