Effective decision-making hinges on timely data analysis, yet many businesses face obstacles in accessing and utilizing their data efficiently. Statistics reveal the severity of this challenge: 63% of businesses struggle to analyze data promptly, while employees spend over 18 hours weekly compiling data from various sources.
Microsoft's Power BI platform offers a remedy through embedded analytics, enabling organizations to seamlessly integrate real-time data insights directly into their websites and applications. By leveraging Power BI's interactive visualizations and dashboards, companies can overcome data accessibility barriers and empower users with actionable insights.
In this article, we’ll be showing you how to integrate Power BI reports into your business for easy access to your business analysis report.
Before we delve into that, let's clarify: What precisely constitutes Embedded analytics?
What are Embedded Analytics?
Embedded analytics is a way to integrate reports from stand-alone platforms directly in your own software, application, or product. Let’s talk about it in more detail by using Power BI as an example. Power BI is a stand-alone software where you get detailed insights about your business growth. Now, your own application may need that data, but it can’t show you that Power BI data.
That means every single time you need to use or go through that data again, you have to open Power BI. And nobody wants to do this every single time. So, with embedded analytics, you can just easily embed the reports from Power BI directly into your own product or software.
The good thing is that as long as what you have is a website or app, it can be easily integrated with Power BI. Now, knowing how this can make your business process and analysis much faster, how do you integrate it?
How to integrate PowerBI into your website
Embedding Power BI analytics and reports only takes a few steps and you’re done. However, before you can embed the analytics, you actually need to make sure you have a Power BI account first. When that’s done, you can follow these steps to do the integration:
Create a PowerBI report
The first thing we’ll do is to create and have our report ready. To do that, go to your Power BI Desktop app and click on “Get Data” to connect to your data source and create a report. If you already have the report ready, you can skip this step.
If not, move on to choose your desired data source and also select the tables or queries you want to use in your report. Once your data is loaded, drag and drop visualisations onto the report canvas to create your desired layout. You’re free to customise this report as you like with the customisation options you have on the Power BI desktop app.
When you’re done, save the report somewhere you can easily access it — we’ll be needing it later.
Publish your report to PowerBI Service
The next thing you want to do is to get your report published to Power BI service. From here, you’ll be able to configure your report for integration into other applications. Be sure that the report’s data sources are accessible to users of your application before you publish it.
Meanwhile, this service is not free. So, you need to buy a license from Microsoft to have access to this service and to get your generated report online.
After getting it, log in to the Power BI service in your browser. In your dashboard, you'll find a 'Get Data' button that will help us upload our BI report. Click on the button.
Now, on the Get Data page, you'll need to let the application know where your report is coming from. And since yours is already created and saved on your computer, choose the Files option and select Local Files.
From the explorer window that opens up, look for the Power BI report you saved earlier and upload it.
When the file gets uploaded successfully, you'll find it under the Reports section.
Configure the embedding settings
Locate the file you just uploaded in the ‘Reports’ section and open it in the Power BI service. Next, click on the File option, and select Publish to Web.
After that, you'll have a pop-up window that asks you to create an embed code. Click the 'Create Embed Code' button and select the 'Publish' button.
Now, you'll have your embed code links in a pop-up window. You can customize them to different pre-defined sizes as you see fit for your application.
Get your embed code
We suggest you go with the one with the <iframe> option because you can easily add it in your website without going through other long processes. However, it depends on whichever one will work best for you.
Add embed code to your application
Finally, we’ll add the report to your website. All you have to do is to just copy the iframe link from the pop-up and paste it in your website.
For example, if your website is a WordPress website, just open the blog post where you need the report, and switch to the 'Text' tab to show the HTML code for that page.
Now, locate the section where you want to show the report and paste the link there.
Viola!!
You've successfully integrated Power BI into your website.
Conclusion
Having your business report data directly embedded in your application makes access to the data easy for you and your customers. With embedded Analytics, you can make analytics reports, dashboards, and meaningful data visualisations available at the fingertips of your customers, employees, partners or end-users. And they don’t have to go out of your application.
In this article, we’ve discussed what you need to know to integrate Power BI in your business for a smoother user experience. Ready to explore further? Contact onpoint today to learn more about Power BI and optimize your analytics strategy.
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