How to integrate Power BI reports with a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint

Graphic reports share a lot of information quickly. If your organization uses Power BI, look for those stories in existing reports before you create them from scratch for Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

If your organization is using Microsoft Power BI mobile, you have access to a lot of data via interactive reporting. That information is vital when making decisions and presenting growth, goals, and other benchmarks to others in your organization. Now Power BI reports are easier than ever to share because you can add them to Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

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In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to share Power BI reports as live reports or embedded images working from PowerPoint or Power BI mobile. Working with existing Power BI reports will save you a lot of preparation time.

This feature is available to Microsoft 365 and Power BI mobile users.

How to get Power BI in Microsoft PowerPoint

You may already have this feature in PowerPoint. Click the Insert tab and look for the Power BI group in the middle of the ribbon. Click the button to add a frame and start the process.

If you don’t find that button, download Power BI as follows:

1. Click the Insert tab.
2. In the Add-ins group, click Get Add-ins.
3. In the resulting dialog, search for Power BI.
4. Choose Microsoft Power BI, as shown in Figure A, and click OK. Downloading might take a few seconds.

Figure A

Regardless of whether you used the Power BI button or the add-in, you’re now ready to link to the report. To do so, access the report online using Power BI mobile, paste its URL into the add-in control, as shown in Figure B, and click Insert. Allow a few seconds for this feature to link to the appropriate report.

Figure B

Figure C

Figure C shows the resulting report in a PowerPoint slide. During the show, you can filter the reports as if you were using Power BI mobile. In addition, the link is live, so as you update information via the data source, the link updates the reports in PowerPoint. To embed another report, you will need to download a new add-in frame or click the Power BI button via the PowerPoint interface.

You don’t have to start with PowerPoint. You can also share the report from Power BI mobile to PowerPoint.

How to share a Power BI report to Microsoft PowerPoint

If you prefer to start with Microsoft Power BI mobile, open the report and then use Share or Export. Both options offer a PowerPoint choice and end up displaying the dialog shown in Figure D.

After copying the link, open PowerPoint and insert the URL in a Power BI frame as you did above.

Figure D

The difference with this route is that Export lets you embed the report as an image, which won’t update, or a live link, which will. Share lets you send a link to people via email or open the report in a new PowerPoint file.

Using either Export or Share you can bypass the add-in download task by clicking Open in PowerPoint (Figure D). Doing so opens a new .pptx file and imports the report into a slide without downloading the add-in frame first.

Sharing in Microsoft PowerPoint

Those with which you share the PowerPoint presentation will need an active Power BI account and access to the report to view the data in the presentation. Use the Share option to PowerPoint shown in the previous section.

Users without permission must request access to the report from its owner directly from inside the PowerPoint presentation.

Thanks to this new connection capability between Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft PowerPoint, you can share your data’s story in your PowerPoint presentations using existing Power BI reports. That link is live, so regardless of when you share that story, your reports will be up to date. For working efficiently, you can’t beat this combination.