Improve accessibility of your Power BI reports with Microsoft Teams app

There are different ways how to access your Power BI reports and Microsoft Teams app is one of the best.

Creating reports make sense as long as users are really using them. There are two main part that impacting success of your report, its?content?and its?accessibility.

In this article we will focus on accessibility part.

Power BI web portal

Standard way to access Power BI reports is through?Power BI web portal . When user need to access report this way he must open web browser and then open Power BI web portal page. But users are using web browser for many different purposes and some times it became a bit crowded place with many apps on home page and many pages in bookmarks bar. Technically it is the easiest way how to start with Power BI cloud service, but there are more effective and dedicated alternatives.

Power BI Windows app

Power BI Windows app is available in?Microsoft Store . Installing this application will improve accessibility of your Power BI reports because users can pin this Power BI app to Start menu or even to Taskbar and have it available on one click. For the users consuming Power BI reports very often it is the best and fastest option.

Power BI for MS Teams

There is also third way that is in the middle of above two mentioned possibilities in regards to speed of accessing Power BI reports. It is faster than access through web browser, because Microsoft Teams has user usually open non-stop to be available for calls or chats. Compare to web browser, Microsoft Teams is dedicated to company applications and resources so Power BI app will not be lost in many other content. It is not one click access like in case of dedicated Windows app, but for users who are consuming Power BI reports few times per week, this will be the best option. Also for all the others who just don’t want to install another application and prefer to display Power BI reports in MS Teams.

Companies using Microsoft Teams are adopting more and more its features. It started with calls and chats but now MS Teams are offering even much more.

Do you remember when you use your mobile phone just for calls and sms? And how much time it now takes from total time you spend with your mobile? Probably something about 10–20%? The same is now happening with MS Teams. The calls and chats are still the main part of this application but you can use many other applications directly from MS Teams and one of them is Microsoft Power BI.

Using Power BI from MS Teams has these benefits:

1. You don’t need to go to your web browser to display reports.
2. You don’t need to login to Power BI because it use your MS Teams credentials automatically.
3. You can add Power BI tab into your Teams channels so users can access related content directly from that channel without going to web browser + opening particular Power BI workspace
4. You can send in chats quick links to Power BI report sessions so other will see exactly what you see including specific page of report, active filters etc.

For companies that already adopted both these Microsoft products, it definitely make sense to allow and deploy this MS Teams Power BI app and provide their employees with training how to effectively use this new feature.

For more detail follow these links:

Announcing: New Power BI experiences in Microsoft Teams

Guide to enabling your organization to use Power BI in Microsoft Teams

You can find more my articles about Power BI on Medium.com