New Power BI tool streamlines datacentric storytelling

This feature was developed in direct response to feedback from our user community and is designed to provide an efficient tool for managing multiple Power BI add-ins within PowerPoint presentations.

Background

Power BI Storytelling enables users to embed interactive reports and visuals into PowerPoint, supporting data-driven presentations across organizations. As adoption has grown, many of you expressed the need for a centralized mechanism to manage and update several Power BI add-ins across multiple slides. You told us that you are using Power BI add-in for PowerPoint to create data-centric presentations, which you are updating every week or month, and that going over all the add-ins in the presentation and repeating the same operation is time consuming. The Power BI Controller addresses this need by allowing users to execute bulk operations from a single interface.

An example scenario

Consider a business leader preparing a monthly review presentation containing multiple embedded Power BI reports covering sales, operations, and finance. This user creates a new version of the presentation every month, with that month latest data captured as image mode, and then shares it with the relevant stakeholders.

Capabilities with Power BI Controller:

• Switch all add-ins to from their current image view to live view with a single action, ensuring every report displays the most current data.
• After updating, revert all add-ins to image view, locking the data for secure sharing.
• Distribute the finalized presentation to stakeholders, confident that all information is accurate and up to date, without the need for repetitive manual updates.

Introducing the Power BI Controller add-in

The Power BI Controller is a task pane add-in that serves as a central command center for all Power BI add-ins within a presentation. With this tool, users can efficiently perform operations across all add-ins, ensuring consistency and saving valuable time.

To get this add-in go to 'Add-ins' in PowerPoint ribbon and search for 'Microsoft Power BI Controller'. Select 'Add' to add-in to your ribbon. Once you select it, a new panel will open with the commands that the Power BI Controller supports in this preview release (change view modes from snapshot/public snapshot to live and vice versa, and sync with Power BI. More commands will be added soon.)

When you apply a command on the entire presentation, only the add-ins that can honor the command will execute it. Other add-ins might reject it and will report back to the controller as not applicable. For example, if you send a 'Switch to snapshot' command and there are add-ins in the presentation that are already in snapshot mode they will not re-take the snapshot but will report to the controller that this command is not applicable for them. Other add-ins, which are in live mode, will respect the command and will switch to snapshot mode.

Call to Action

We encourage all Power BI Storytelling users to leverage the Power BI Controller in their next presentation.

Your feedback is invaluable and will help us continue to enhance this feature. Please share your experiences and suggestions and keep voting on Ideas to help us determine what to build next.