Displaying Microsoft Power BI Dashboards On Screens In Your Office

VuePilot provides a Power BI app that makes rotating your Power BI dashboards on TV screens around the office extremely simple.
You can create a new app for each different dashboard or report you wish to display and give them a name such as “Sales & Marketing Dashboard“. You can then assign these apps to your screens that are managed by VuePilot using the online dashboard.

Please Note – This guide is for displaying Power BI Dashboards, which is slightly different to displaying Power BI reports, please see our guide here for displaying Power BI reports

Power BI apps can be used with our Hijack feature, like any other app so you can immediately trigger a display to show a dashboard with just a few clicks, perfect for meetings or high priority incidents where you need to pull attention to a dashboard right away.

Follow these easy steps to get up and running

Step 1: Copy The Dashboard URL

From your Power BI interface, when viewing the dashboard you wish to display, simply copy the URL from the browsers address bar

Step 2: Create Power BI App

Select Microsoft Power BI from the apps list

Give the report a name, select “Dashboard” from the type dropdown and then paste the URL into the “Dashboard URL” input box

Hide Control Option

Use the “Hide Controls” option to hide all elements of the user interface except for the charts and the dashboard content. This is essentially a “full screen” option

Fit To Screen Option

Use the “Fit To Screen” option to automatically toggle the Fit To Screen UI option and make your dashboard fill up the whole width of the screen.

A Note About “Fit To Screen”

Microsoft does not make this option available via URL parameters so the VuePilot software will automatically trigger the “Fit To Screen” option on your dashboard when the page loads. This option will only be visible when viewing the dashboard screen from within the VuePilot software. The VuePilot software will send instructions to the page to trigger the “Fit To Screen” action. This is something to be aware of as using the “Preview” button from the online dashboard will not show this options effect, however using the “Preview” button from within the VuePilot software will.

The “Fit To Screen” option in the VuePilot Power BI app, is equivalent to clicking this button on the Power BI dashboard interface

Why Is The Preview Button Hidden When Editing The App?

Due to Microsoft restrictions on dashboard embedding, the preview function is not available for Power BI dashboards, only for reports. To preview, you must display the dashboard on the VuePilot software. You can do this be either using the Hijack functionality, add the app to a rotation or using th Preview button from within the VuePilot software on your machine.

Step 3: Assign The App To A Rotation

Now simply click the “Add To Rotation” button and select the rotations you wish to display the dashboard in. The rotations are assigned to the screens in your office that are being controlled by the VuePilot player software.

Within the next rotation, your dashboard will begin appearing on the screens displaying these rotations

Step 4: Authenticate The VuePilot Players

When you login to the Power BI dashboard, the local machine stores the authentication cookie, so we need to also authenticate the VuePilot players installed on your devices.

We can do this, from the VuePilot Player software by simply viewing the rotation, from the “Rotations” panel and then clicking the “Preview” button next on our Power BI app row (the screen icon).

This will open the Power Bi app in a new window and present you with the Microsoft Login screen.

Simply login to the report as normal, and once you see the report content appear, you can close this window as this VuePilot Player is now authenticated and will be authenticated during normal rotations.

*Please Note* Be sure to to click YES when prompted if you would like to stay signed in to Microsoft, also check the “Don’t show this again” box. This will allow us to continue displaying dashboards without you needing to frequently re-authenticate

You can now preview, view and remotely manage your dashboard screens with VuePilot. Click the preview button again to test

Repeat this process for any additional players.

Regarding Session Expiry

If you are experiencing session logouts more frequently then you would like you may need to configure your organisations refresh tokens expiration limits.
Please see this article for more information https://www.vuepilot.com/support/article/microsoft-power-bi-authentication-information/

Troubleshooting Power BI App Issues

Please see our guide for troubleshooting app issues here: https://www.vuepilot.com/support/article/troubleshooting-microsoft-power-bi-issues/