Beginning Power BI for Business Users

9Refreshing, Sharing, and Collaborating

I'm sure you're still scratching your head about how you'll share this content with others! Well, we're here now!

In this chapter, we'll cover three topics: refreshing the data in your report, sharing your reports, and collaborating with others in report development.

Before we jump into the sharing aspect, we'll examine how to keep that report up-to-date with the most recent data.

REFRESHING DATA

Let's talk about your old process of building reports with something like Excel. Typically, you'd be presented with the need to create a report, and you would need to find where that data was. Once you found or received the data, you would somehow import that data into Excel, probably by copying and pasting from an original source. Ideally you're not keying it in manually. Then you arranged the data in a way that would be presentable for your report consumers. Next, you'd disseminate that report in some way. People would use your report, and everyone would be able to analyze to their hearts’ content. Then what happens? You get more data. Either a new financial period (like next month) or updated data comes in. At that point you must decide: am I going to create a new report or update my previous report? If I create a new one, then at least I'd be able to keep track of historical data. But maybe I want to just add a new worksheet to my Excel document, rearrange it, and then redistribute it. Either way, I need to create or update the report. ...