One feature that was released in the December update for Power BI but got lost in all the fuss over Q&A was the ability to favourite a report and have it appear in your own “My Power BI” site. In fact there are several interesting things to see here, and while they are documented I thought it would be useful to show some screenshots.
On the main Power BI page, you can now click on the ellipses at the bottom right hand corner of a report to favourite it.
This means it will appear in your own “My Power BI” site. I hadn’t really noticed this page before; you can find a link to it in the top right hand corner of the screenshot above.
With no reports favourited your “My Power BI” site looks like this:
With a report favourited it looks like this:
So, it’s a nice place to find a user’s top reports. There’s more though. Clicking on the ‘data’ link shows you a dashboard with your own usage stats on:
Plus a list of all the Power Query queries you have shared:
And finally metadata for all of the OData data sources (this includes data sources made available through the Data Management Gateway as well as public data searches) you have used in Power Query on the desktop, even if you have never saved the workbook they’re used in to Power BI:
You can find more information on what’s going on in this last screenshot here. I quote:
When users either connect to various external and internal data sources or share queries using Power Query, metadata for the connected data sources or the underlying data sources for the shared queries respectively gets created in the cloud-based metadata repository of Power BI for Office 365. The metadata of such data sources become available in the Manage Data portal.
The Manage Data portal displays all the data sources available in the cloud-based metadata repository of Power BI whether or not you have access to the data in the data source. The data source listing displays the name, location, description, the user who last modified it, and the date when it was last modified.
I have to admit that this was a bit of a surprise to see, but I probably read something about this and forgot about it. I can understand why it’s necessary: Power BI is doing this is to help data stewards manage requests for permissions to access these data sources. Here’s the metadata that gets stored:
So, lots of interesting stuff there. I have to say that SharePoint Online and Power BI are a bit of a rabbit warren and some of the functionality in there is very well hidden, however good the docs are…
