IMPORTANT: A Note About Power BI Licensing
Power BI is a Microsoft product, and licensing requirements change regularly. All clients are responsible for independently assessing their specific licensing needs.
While a license is not required for a single user to view their Power BI dashboards, clients who intend to share dashboards to multiple users may need to purchase a single Power BI license for the user who will complete this setup process. Here is a summary of the current requirements at the time of writing:
- If you plan to share a dashboard with multiple users, you will need to publish your dashboard to a shared workspace. A single Power BI Pro license is required for a user to publish Dashboards to a shared workspace.
- All other users can access and view shared dashboards using the Free Per-User license, so you do not need to purchase Pro accounts for all other users who will simply view the dashboards.
- Clients who only intend for a single user to view the dashboards can do so with the Free Per-User license.
These details are subject to change at Microsoft's discretion. For your convenience, here is a link to Microsoft's Power BI License documentation: Power BI service per-user and capacity-based licenses
Beck Tech provides Hosted Environment clients with pre-configured Power BI report files for use with Power BI Online. Clients need to publish these files to a Power BI Online workspace in order to view the dashboard.
While publishing to a personal workspace allows a single user to view the dashboard, if you want to share access to other users, you will need to set up a shared workspace. This guide provides instructions for establishing a workspace in Power BI Online, how to publish your dashboard files to that workspace, and how to configure a scheduled refresh cycle so that the data is updated daily.
NOTE: This process should be completed using Power BI Online, not the desktop version of Power BI. Security measures that are in place to keep your data safe prevent the use of Power Bi Desktop.
If you have a specific need for using Power BI Desktop, please contact the Support team.
How to Publish Your Power BI File
- Send a request to Beck Tech Support for your Power BI files if you don't have them already. You will be sent one or more pre-configured files.
- If you plan to make the dashboard available for multiple users, you will need to have access to a shared workspace. Follow the steps through the following link:
- Follow these steps to upload your files to your shared workspace (note publishing files to s a shared workspace may require a paid license).
- Click on Workspaces.
- Click on the Workspace you created in Step 2 of this article.
- Click Upload.
- Browse to the location where you save the files, highlight them and click Open.
- Set up a Refresh schedule using the credentials provided in the same email as your Power BI Files from Beck Tech Support
Note: If you are experiencing an issue with the map view, please check out this article - Map and Filled Visuals Are Disabled in Power BI - or reach out to Microsoft Support.
How To Set up the Power BI Yearly Cost Escalation Excel Workbook
We have a new workflow on how to show the Yearly cost index for projects, which can be found in this article.
Power BI Usage Demo Video
The following link contains a demo on how to use the Dashboard - Dashboard walkthrough.
Accessing the Database To See the Tables and Views
The read-only permissions for the Power Bi file also allows you to access the database. But this will require getting your IP whitelisted for server access (contact Support to enquire).
To connect to the database using SSMS, follow the steps below:
1. Enter the server name and credentials that were provided. The server name and database can also be found in the Power BI file
2. Click the Options tab and Enter the database name and click Connect
Updating Credentials In Power BI Desktop for the Power Query Editor
If you have been whitelisted as detailed above, you will also have the ability to open the .pbix file in Power BI Desktop and make edits in the Power Query Editor. Here, you may be prompted to enter credentials. Here are the steps to do so:
1. Open the .pbix file in Power BI Desktop and click on click on the 'Transform Data' button on the top Ribbon.
2. The Power Query Editor will open and you will see a prompt: "Please specify how to connect'.
3. Click the 'Edit Credentials' button to reach the below screen. Select 'Database' on the left menu, Input the username and password you were issued with your pbix file. Lastly, in the Level at the bottom, the option that shows both the server AND your database name (eg. servername.database.windows.net;your_destinidata_ database_name_destinidata).
4. Click 'Connect'.