Hold Your Dashboards in Your Pocket, Part 2: Use Your Predefined Dashboards on Your Windows Devices

In a previous post, “Hold Your Dashboards in Your Pocket, Part 1: Use Your Predefined Dashboards on Your IOS Devices“, I explained how to use Power BI app on your IOS devices.

In this post I express how to use Power BI app on your Windows devices. It’s relatively easy to install and use the Windows app.

• Go to www.powerbi.com and click on the “Download from Windows Store” button
  

• It automatically leads to the app page on your Windows Store
  
• Click Install to install the app
  

• After the app installed successfully open it from start menu
  

• Click Sign In
  

• Enter your account info and click “Continue” then “Sign In”
  
• After you signed in click on “AdventureWorks” from dashboards section
  

• After browsing your dashboard you can click on each chart to open it
  
• To write an annotation and share an screenshot of the chart you can click on the share button, write annotation and send it to a colleague by clicking on the share button
  

• If the chart is pinned to the dashboard from an existing report you can browse the report by clicking on the report button
  

• You can click on each chart item from the report’s charts to see relative changes on the other charts. This will navigate you to the corresponding report page that the chart belongs to
  

• You can also sort the charts OR select multiple chart items. To do so right click on a chart (you can do the same by long clicking on a chart)
  

• You can also change the chart filters:
  
  • Click on a chart
    
  • Click “Filters” from the right pane
    

• Click “Visual” and setup a desired filter
  

• To invite a colleague to see the dashboard, go back to the “Adventure Works” dashboard and click on the “Invite a Colleague” button then enter the recipients’ email addresses, type a message then click “Invite”. You can allow/disallow the recipients the ability to share the dashboard with others by clicking ticking the corresponding tick box.
  

• You can open each report from the “Reports” located in the home screen of the app
  

• To create a new dashboard/report you can right click on home screen of the app and select dashboard/report that navigates you to the corresponding page. Then you can add new dashboard from “Dashboards” page or add a new report from “Reports” page. Clicking on the “Add a new dashboard/report” will open your browser so that you can create new dashboard/report from there. Therefore, I don’t think this is something helpful as you can always go and browse your Power BI projects online and create new dashboard/report from the website.
  

This is how you can use the Windows app on your Windows based machine. I tried to cover almost everything that looks useful or important to me.

In the next articles of the Power BI series I’ll dive more deeply into the Power BI and its advances features.