Learning Microsoft Power BI

Chapter 8. Introduction to the Power BI Service

Now that you’ve completed the previous chapter, you have a beautiful report filled to the brim with insights. You’re ready to share your creation with the organization to help make the big decisions...but how? You share by using the Power BI service.

Power BI is more than just the Desktop authorship tool we’ve been discussing thus far. It’s an ecosystem of products, and in this chapter, you’ll find out about the second part of that ecosystem, the Power BI service. The Power BI service is the software-as-a-service (SaaS) portion of the Power BI infrastructure that allows end users to share reports with one another, manage access to workspaces, create reusable data elements for other report users in the forms of dataflows, and create collections of report elements for broad distribution in the form of apps.

In this chapter, you’ll learn the basics of the Power BI service. How do you log in? How do you navigate around? What’s a workspace? Why do workspaces matter? How do you use the Power BI service to share reports? There’s much to unpack, so let’s get started!

The Basics of the Service: What You Need to Know

Initially, you can log into the service and enter your Microsoft account (or employer account) credentials. Everybody can access the Power BI service with a “free” license. That free license gives you access to “My workspace.” In this personal development space, where you can publish reports and review ...