Visualizing data with Power BI

Power BI is a Power Platform tool designed to create interactive data visualizations in the form of reports or dashboards. As with the other tools we’ve seen, Power BI is a tool available as its own app in M365, usable from the web, or as a downloadable Windows or mobile app. Power BI is licensed differently from the rest of the Power Platform. Power BI Pro is only included with M365 E5 licenses, not all licenses like the rest of the Power Platform. The app allows us to both create and consume content. In SharePoint on-premises, tools such as SQL Server Reporting Services were commonly used to create reports from SharePoint list data. Those reports no longer work with SharePoint Online, but their outputs can be replaced with Power BI.

While Power BI is a vast subject certainly deserving of a book all its own, let’s focus on how Power BI can be used to quickly visualize list data in SharePoint. We can begin with the built-in integration...