Using Power BI Visuals inside your PowerPoint presentation

Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash

We like to make jokes about PowerPoint being the first product of the Power Platform, and the fact that it’s a great tool for beginners to create Power BI report background images doesn’t help with that. But on a more serious note: Power BI recently introduced the option to add a live Power BI report page or a single visual to your PowerPoint presentation.

At first, I was like: But why? If you want to show your audience something, bring them to the Power BI service. But when I was giving a presentation lately, it was so nice to stay in presentation mode and show the figures you want. It doesn’t interrupt the proces with opening browsers, leaving presenter mode etc. And I love it!

Adding a page to your PowerPoint

There are multiple ways to get your page inside a PowerPoint presentation. The first one is: Inside the Power BI service you need to open a report and go to

1. Export
2. PowerPoint
3. Embed Live data

If this isn’t available for you, it might be caused by your admin disabling the feature:

After exporting, you’ll see the following pop-up:

And after selecting Open in PowerPoint, a new presentation is opened including your page:

Another option is to copy the URL of your page (something like this: https://app.powerbi.com/groups/########/reports/#####/ReportSection######

For me, that didn’t work that great. So I used the share option and copied the link. Now be careful because with that link (depending on your settings) you give access to everyone who has your PowerPoint Presentation. The link looks something like this: https://app.powerbi.com/links/-####?ctid=#######&pbi_source=linkShare&bookmarkGuid=######

In PowerPoint you can go to Insert and select the Power BI Add-in, and copy the url:

But what if you want to add your whole report and don’t want to copy and paste the URL for every page? Then you have to add a page navigator in your report, because currently there is no option to do this. The result will look like this:

Now, what happens if a user doesn’t have access? He or she gets a nice error message:

Sharing individual visuals

The other thing I want to show you is using an individual visual inside your PowerPoint presentation. Imagine you got a beautifully created report that you use every month, and want to add some numbers, that update automatically!

Instead of going to Export, you can:

1. Right-click your visual
2. Select Share
3. Open in PowerPoint

You will get almost the same sharing option as we saw first. After copying the link, you can go to your presentation and insert the Power BI Add-in. There you paste the copied link:

Now, let’s give our audience a little bit more extra information! By right clicking the left icon on the right we can generate some insights:

Rounding up

This new experience is in my opinion genuinely amazing. While presenting you can easily show the latest numbers without having to leave your presentation. If you use the same presentation repeatedly to present the current or monthly numbers, you don’t even have to update anything at all!

Take care.

Originally published at http://sidequests.blog on March 31, 2023.