Publishing Excel workbooks, or tiling parts of a workbook

You don't have to import workbooks into Power BI Service to use them, as this page will show!

Publishing directly from Excel

Rather than pull a workbook into Power BI Service, you can push (or publish) it from Excel:

Use this menu option to publish a workbook to Power BI Service.

You'll be prompted to sign in, then you'll be able to choose how to upload the workbook:

See the previous part of this blog for what the two different options mean.

Power PI Publisher add-in

Another option would be to install an Excel add-in allowing you to publish parts of a workbook to Power BI.  You can download this here.

Installing this add-in gives you an extra tab on your ribbon.

Note that if after installing your add-in you can't see this tab, you may need to tick the COM add-in in File / Options:

Choose this option in the Excel Options dialog box then click on the Go... button. You should then be able to choose the Power BI add-in.

You can then pin individual parts of a workbook:

Here I'm pinning this chart.  You'll obviously need to check you're signed into Power BI Service at this point.

You can then choose to which dashboard to pin this:

Here we're creating a new dashboard, and pinning the chart to that.

You can use the Pin Manager to see what you've done:

Click on this tool on the add-in ribbon to see your pin history!

I've pinned all my bits to the same dashboard:

You can see when you last pinned each bit of your workbook.

Here's the peculiar dashboard I ended up with:

Hmmm ... pin them, or bin them?

And with that, I think I've exhausted all the ways in which you can get Excel and Power BI Service to talk to each other!  Time to move on to the next section of this Power BI Service training, which is on creating and using app workspaces.