How to design and review reports for mobile devices in Power BI
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Don’t disappoint end users by leaving them out of the mobile world. Use Microsoft Power BI’s mobile layout feature to optimize dashboards for mobile devices.
Mobile devices are great for a quick document or project check-in when employees are away from their PCs. When it comes to Microsoft Power BI, end users often need access to dashboards from outside the office — whether that’s in a meeting, at lunch with a coworker, visiting a client site or catching up on work at home.
Fortunately, Power BI designers can design and optimize dashboards for mobile devices, saving end users a lot of frustration by giving them up-to-date access to information wherever they are.
SEE: Hiring kit: Microsoft Power BI developer (TechRepublic Premium)
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the mobile layout feature to design a Power BI dashboard for mobile devices. The design works with all mobile sizes and shapes that rely on iOS, Windows and Android mobile operating systems.
For this demonstration, I’m using Microsoft Power BI desktop on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can also use Power BI service. If you’re interested in following along during this tutorial, you can download the demonstration .pbix file, Adventure Works Sales, from GitHub. Once downloaded, double-click the .pbix file to open it in Power BI; alternatively, you can use a .pbix file of your own.
Jump to:
Thanks to Power BI’s built-in features, configuring a dashboard for mobile devices is fairly straightforward. Before we get to that, however, we need visuals. Let’s create a quick report.
Figure A shows a simple set of reports that you can quickly create. To create the column chart, do the following:
Figure A
To create the profit card, do the following:
Create a second card and check % Profit Amount measure in the Sales table or leave it blank. The content isn’t that important. Configuring it all to fit on a mobile device is our focus.
For a quick comparison, let’s publish the report as you normally would with these steps:
Figure B
As a Power BI designer, there are formats you might want to apply to make all three visuals look better, but for our purposes, this isn’t necessary. Now that you’ve seen the published report, let’s reconfigure it to display on a mobile device.
The good news is that Power BI does all the work for you when designing reports and dashboards for mobile. To illustrate, let’s return to Power BI. Web view is the default, so take the following steps to add a mobile layout:
Figure C
Figure D
At this point, we have a reasonable dashboard for mobiles. If you’re worried about the original web configuration, don’t be concerned — you won’t lose it. The web dashboard will offer two views: web and phone. You can access the phone layout using the web layout from the Edit menu.
SEE: How to build reports in Microsoft Power BI (TechRepublic)
We didn’t do much to our phone view in order to keep things simple, but you can arrange the visuals in any order, resize and so on. If you don’t want all the visuals in mobile view, don’t add them. You have a great deal of flexibility when designing and formatting this optimized view.
We optimized only page one of the report. Make sure to follow this same process with all pages you want to make viewable on mobile.
Now we’re ready to view the dashboard view on a mobile device.
To see the new mobile view, republish the report using the instructions above. It doesn’t matter what view you’re in when you do so. When asked to replace the existing dashboard, click Replace.
On your mobile device, use your favorite online app store to download and install the Microsoft Power BI app if you don’t already have it. It only takes about a minute, and your store should know to download the right version. If prompted, be sure to denote whether you’re using an Android, iOS or Windows Phone, though that shouldn’t be necessary.
On your mobile device, do the following:
Figure E
Figure F
Figure G shows the resulting dashboard on an Android phone. At this point in time, you can interact with the dashboard as you normally would with the web layout.
SEE: Mobile device security policy (TechRepublic Premium)
It isn’t perfect yet, but you still have the option to return to Power BI Desktop or service to make changes. If you choose to go back and make additional changes, be sure to republish to commit those changes to the mobile version dashboards.
Figure G
The link to the published dashboard, in this case, is irrelevant. If you send that to someone, they will open Power BI in designer view, which isn’t what you want. Instead, make sure you share the report to a public workspace or to a workspace that end users are authorized to access. If the report isn’t visible to end viewers, you might have to grant permission to the workspace or the report itself.
Read next: Best business intelligence tools (TechRepublic)
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How to design and review reports for mobile devices in Power BI
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