Mobile BI Using Power BI

The Microsoft Power BI eco­sys­tem includes the well-known Power BI Desktop and Power BI Ser­vice for cre­at­ing and visu­al­iz­ing reports and dash­boards, but did you know that it also offers a mobile applic­a­tion that allows users to check and inter­act with their dash­boards from their phone or tab­let? What’s more, it provides the developers with tools to improve dash­board and report visu­al­iz­a­tion in mobile devices. Most of the fea­tures of Power BI reports still work in PBI Mobile, but the mobile app includes func­tion­al­it­ies spe­cific­ally aimed at improv­ing the report visu­al­iz­a­tion exper­i­ence on mobile devices. Let’s have a look at the most rel­ev­ant functionalities.

1. Power BI  Mobile: main functionalities

1.1. Spe­cial design lay­outs for mobile devices

Power BI provides a spe­cial lay­out that recre­ates a phone inter­face to help developers to design reports and dash­boards in PBI Desktop and PBI Ser­vice, eas­ily chan­ging from desktop to mobile layout.

In PBI Desktop, visu­al­iz­a­tions are cre­ated and format­ted in the desktop lay­out and can then be added to the mobile lay­out. For instance, we can jump from the Desktop report visu­al­iz­a­tion below…

… to this Mobile report view, where we can rearrange views and fil­ters to adapt our report to the mobile layout.

Sim­il­arly, in PBI Ser­vice, we can select from the visu­als pinned to a dash­board for their inclu­sion in the mobile dash­board view.

1.2. Device compatibility

As with any other com­mon mobile app, we can use PBI Mobile on our Android phone or tab­let as well as on iPhones and iPads. Addi­tion­ally, being a Microsoft product, it’s com­pat­ible with Win­dows 10 phones, and even allows us to con­sult some visual types, like KPIs or card tiles, using Apple Watch.

1.3. Spe­cial mobile inter­activ­ity for views

The PBI Mobile app has improved the view inter­ac­tion exper­i­ence, sim­pli­fy­ing some of the most com­mon tasks we do when con­sum­ing our reports.

For example, in a line or a pie chart, we can tap on a spe­cific point to check the val­ues for that spe­cific part of the visualization.

Or in a map view, we could tap the Centre Map icon to centre the view to our cur­rent location.

1.4. Respons­ive filters

All fil­ters – or as they are known in the PBI world, slicers – can be made respons­ive, which will allow us to res­ize them to fit the space left in the report. This will work in any report type, but you’ll find this fea­ture espe­cially use­ful when design­ing lay­outs for mobile phones, as it will help make bet­ter use of space, leav­ing more room for data visualizations.

1.5. Scan bar code

The Power BI Mobile app can be used to scan QR codes in the real world then use them to open a spe­cific view or report.

1.6. Q&A by text or voice

As we explained in one of our recent art­icles, one of the key fea­tures of Power BI is its Nat­ural Lan­guage Pro­cessing abil­ity which, through the Ques­tions and Answers (Q&A) option, allows the user to dis­cover insights in their data by simply mak­ing short requests like “show me the top 5 regions by sales”. PBI Mobile includes this func­tion­al­ity and even includes a voice request option.

1.7. Annot­ate and share views out­side PBI

We can annot­ate reports in the PBI Mobile app, add our own com­ments, and then share the snap­shot with oth­ers, even if they are not PBI users. We can share the snap­shot using 3^rd party apps, for example, email.

2. Lim­it­a­tions

Power BI Mobile is, in gen­eral, a great app for visu­al­iz­ing and inter­act­ing with our dash­boards wherever we are, but there are a couple of areas that need improvement.

2.1. Lack of flex­ib­il­ity in the design layouts

Unlike the phone view, for which we have a spe­cific design­ing lay­out, tab­lets will dis­play the reports in the same way as in the Power BI Ser­vice, so reports can­not be designed for tab­let landscape/portrait formats. Another catch is that the mobile lay­out is for a gen­eric phone, so it is not pos­sible to check how the reports will look on dif­fer­ent devices with dif­fer­ent screen sizes.

All the format changes must be done in the desktop view, so we can­not make any changes that only apply to the mobile view, for example, select a smal­ler font size, so that a spe­cific visu­al­iz­a­tion looks bet­ter on a smal­ler screen.

2.2. Lim­ited map interactivity

Neither is map inter­activ­ity amongst PBI Mobile’s strongest fea­tures; even though there are spe­cific fea­tures like the pos­sib­il­ity to centre or fil­ter the report by cur­rent loc­a­tion,  inter­activ­ity with map views is very lim­ited and does not allow simple actions like select­ing a group of marks simultaneously.

Con­clu­sions

Power BI Mobile allows PBI users to take their reports with them wherever they go. It provides dif­fer­ent design options, so your dash­boards and reports will look amaz­ing no mat­ter what device your users have, and it also includes spe­cific func­tion­al­it­ies to improve the view inter­ac­tion exper­i­ence on mobile devices.

If you want to start cre­at­ing your own dash­boards in Power BI so you can check them any­where with PBI Mobile, con­tact us and we’ll give you a help­ing hand!