Getting up and running with a Power BI developer environment
In contrast to the many tools that require
hours of tedious set-up to get started, Office 365 is a fairly straightforward
and simple set-up. Since setting up a full, paid subscription is probably not
something that too many individuals will want to do, we will walk through using
the free 90 day trial that Microsoft offers as part of their Office 365
subscription. While it isn’t a permanent development environment, it will give
developers plenty of time to fiddle around in the environment with little overhead
in terms of set-up time. If 90 days isn’t enough, you can always sign up for
another free trial or convert your trial to a paid subscription.
One important thing to remember - MSFT offers multiple subscription plans. To
use Power BI it will be necessary to sign up for the Pro Plus, E3 or E4 plans.
In this post, we will be using the free trial associated with the E3
plan.
To get started, head on over to the Office 365 site here
and take a look at the all the plans available. At the bottom of the page is a
link to sign up for the E3 free trial. Here
is a direct link in case finding it proves difficult. It will ask for
information such as company name, your name, etc. Hit next, next, next…you know
the drill. Once signup is complete, you will be able to immediately sign in to
your new account. It's worth noting that it does take a while for all the
services to come online. So while you will be allowed to sign in immediately,
it's possible that not all of your services will be available right
away.
Go to https://portal.office.com and
enter the information that you provided during sign up. I created an
environment for an SQL Saturday presentation, so I named my site
"SQLSaturday" during signup.
Once signed in, you may be greeted with any number of pages or prompts. The easiest way to get to the main admin page is via the little rubick's cube looking icon on the top left of the page.
By default, Power BI will not be set up on your
SharePoint instance. So if you don't see the icon, fear not. We will get that
set up shortly.
Take a tour around the admin console just to get familiar with the options and
other tasks available to you as an admin. Since this is only to be used as a
development environment, many of the set-up tasks can be avoided. However, it
might be nice to tinker with users, groups, permissions, etc, just to be
familiar with the way each works. For now, we will skip that and simply use the
admin account to get up and running. At a later point we will swing back by all
of this and point out real world scenarios.
Click the "Office 365" logo on the top left or head to https://portal.office.com/home . From
there click on the SharePoint icon.
In my environment, SharePoint is still setting up. Once it comes online though, I will be able to access my sites.
I currently only have one site set up. By
default I will arrive at my team site. In the left hand navigation bar, Power
BI shows to already be set up on this site. I have done this previously, so
mine is already available. Power BI is classified as a SharePoint app. In
reality, it's simply a customized document library. Each site will need to add
its own power BI app. So if each department in your organization has a
different SharePoint site (collection), the following steps will need to be
repeated for each site that wants the Power BI app. Here are the steps to get
power BI set up on your site:
On your team site, click the cog icon in the top right hand corner of the page.
From there, choose "Add an app".
Lastly, add the Power BI app from the available list. It may be
necessary to search for the app if it doesn’t show up by default as an
available option. Just type "Power BI" into the search box and it should
show up.
Once the app is chosen, a greeting will appear with info on the app and a prompt at the bottom. Notice the "Let it approve items in the list" drop down. This box is simply saying that anything dropped into the "Documents" folder of the site will be displayed in the Power BI app. Click "Trust It".
At this point, the basics have been set up. In a matter of minutes, we have set up an entire SharePoint environment and added power BI to our team site. This is quite a streamlined process compared to setting up an on premise SharePoint environment. Currently we have one site (team site) set up with Power BI. Remember this menu from earlier with the rubick's cube icon?
Power BI should show up there to all users (you, since you are an admin) who have Power BI access. When clicked, the power BI icon on this menu takes you to a "my power BI" site. This is your personal Power BI site. It's customizable, and only you see it.
Because multiple sites can have Power BI on
them and a user may be a member of multiple sites with Power BI, it stands to
reason that each user will need a place to keep a consolidated view of his or
her Power BI reports from each site. This is that place. Favorite reports can
be saved to this area for easy access.
On the right hand side bar is a direct link to our "Team Site" Power
BI document library. Again, if our environment has multiple sites with Power
BI, we should see multiple sites listed. By clicking on that team site link, we
will be directed to something that looks a lot like this:
From here, we can upload our excel workbooks
with power view by dragging and dropping workbooks from our desktop to the page
seen above.
One last thing - when using the Power BI app or the "my Power BI"
site, a prompt to try the new power BI dashboard preview may be visible. It's
highly recommended that if you plan on using Power BI in your organization,
that you check this out. This is like a phase 2 to the whole Power BI
landscape.
While the entire roadmap for this product is not completely, clear we do know
that quite a bit of effort is being put into this preview, so expect it to play
a very big role in the future. You can click on the "try it now" link
or go to https://powerbi.com to get started.
Our next post will cover the basics of the new Power BI preview designer.
Check here soon for additional info on configuring some of the more advanced
options, including setting up the Data Management Gateway and scheduling reports.
Created with Microsoft OneNote 2013.