Power BI Blog: Power BI Home in Power BI Desktop

Welcome back to our Power BI blogs.  This time, we discuss the new Home screen, now Generally Available to all Power BI Desktop users.

The Power BI Home experience in Desktop is now Generally Available.  Initially introduced last February, this update brings new functionalities that make it easier for you to create reports.  With data sources directly accessible from the Home screen and enhanced discoverability features like the recommendation section and the quick access list, getting started has become simpler.

Power BI Home is a central location for your Power BI content and is designed to consolidate your Power BI tasks into a single location, eliminating the need to navigate through multiple menus.

You can open a new report by expanding the ‘New’ section in Power BI Desktop Home, and selecting Report, viz.

Selecting the ‘Report’ button creates a new report and opens a blank canvas on which you can add data and begin building your report.

You can open existing reports from the ‘Recommended’ section of Power BI Home.  Files are recommended if they've been recently viewed, edited, edited by someone else or else shared with you.

You can collapse the ‘New’ and ‘Recommended’ sections by selecting the small arrow next to their titles.

Furthermore, in Power BI Home, a list of reports you've recently accessed is displayed below the ‘Recent’ section.  Each item shows the file name, its location and the last time you opened the file.

When you select the ‘Shared with Me’ button at the top of the quick access list, this list displays files that are shared by people in the same organisation, i.e. this provides a central location for shared files, making it easier to work together in Power BI.

To view a report in Power BI Desktop Home, you must meet the following requirements:

• have access to the file being displayed
• have a Power BI Pro, Power BI Premium Per User or E5 license.

You should keep the following considerations in mind when using Power BI Desktop Home:

• B2B users and anonymous users can't search files in Power BI Desktop
• If substrate capability is turned off for your organisation, Power BI Home doesn't display Recommended files, you'll only see local files
• Power BI Home features don't work with personal OneDrive accounts
• Power BI Home features aren't available in a sovereign cloud tenant
• Reports with row-level security aren't currently displayed in the Recommended list.  You must download such files to see or use them in Power BI Desktop.

That’s it for this week.  Please stay tuned and don’t miss out on more thoughts and insights from http://www.sumproduct.com.