OneNote now supports live embedded Power BI reports !

If you cope a lot with data, and don’t want to be limited to mere data crunching, but to draw out some useful insights instead, and share professional-looking reports, then Power BI is for you.

Although any Office 365 subscription allows for basic experiments in Power BI desktop (with reports stored locally, thus limited sharing options), you will need a professional (or academic) subscription to “Publish” your reports on the Power BI service (the web interface), for later visualization in OneNote.

First, in Power BI desktop, connect to your Professional account, and “Publish” your report.

Then, connect to the Power BI service (https://powerbi.com), and obtain an URL.

Then, paste it within OneNote :

With this addition, OneNote handles more than 20 formats : Watch by yourself !

A word of caution : you are potentially granting “access by anyone on the internet” with the “Publish to web” option. If your data are confidential, that may not be the right option.

If you have Power BI Pro, another option – “Embed in SharePoint Online” – will allow you to keep your report inside your organization, and manage it’s confidentiality. But you won’t be able to share it through OneNote this way, which was the purpose of this post…

Thanks to Mike Tholfsen, for sharing this great news :

NEW! Two new #OneNote embed types launched today – @PowerBI and https://t.co/TlT5UXup4Q https://t.co/51Tcn7xrec #mieexpert #edtech pic.twitter.com/3Znp4m2794

— Mike Tholfsen (@mtholfsen) 3 avril 2017

Links :

• Get started with Power BI : a short video to get the basics
• ExceleratorBI : an excellent site with ressources for beginners, intermediate and advanced users.
• I strongly recommend buying and reading Learn to Write DAX : if you get stuck with Power BI when trying to do slightly more complex things than drag & drop Pivot table or graph, this may be the right book to read for you : DAX is a journey, and you will be in good hands with Matt Allington !