Power BI Blog: Microsoft Teams

This week, we’re going to divert a little bit away from Power BI directly, and talk about how it can integrate into Microsoft Teams. This is the central part of what Tim’s presentation in Singapore last week was all about. We’ll spread this over the next few weeks. This first week, we’re just going to introduce what Microsoft Teams is, and how it can interface with Power BI.

For those who aren’t aware, Microsoft Teams is a project communication tool that combines a lot of nifty features into one seamless package. If you’ve used tools like Trello or Slack for project communication, or even tools like Discord in your personal life, you will find it a very familiar interface.

The idea is that you can set up teams on the left hand side (in the screenshot above, you can see we have two teams: “Weekly catch-up” and “List of tasks”), and create channels within those teams for specific conversations and files that relate. For example, under the Weekly catch-up team, there are several different channels relating to the things to be discussed in our weekly catch-up, with conversations in each channel.

Now, this flows nicely into Power BI, since creating a team in Microsoft Teams will also create a workspace in Power BI:

Publishing reports and datasets to a workspace that is linked to Teams will allow members of that team to have access to the reports, without needing to share the report with each individual member of the team. As new individuals join, they will immediately gain access as a team member, and as others leave, they will lose their ability to view the results.

Next week, we’ll talk about how you can link files and reports directly into Teams and we’ll start seeing how we can really streamline the data flows between Teams, Excel and Power BI. See you then!