I hope you were able to attend my free webinar on Bringing Power BI Q&A to your Organization on April 15 2014. If you weren’t you can now watch the recording here.
Traditionally following a webinar I try to post a quick Q&A session for everything I was not able to answer in the allotted time.
Q: Does Power BI require SharePoint Online or can it work with public facing on premises SharePoint?
Yes, Power BI sites and Power BI Q&A are only available if you’re using SharePoint Online. Public Facing traditional SharePoint servers do not have the ability to add the Power BI functionality.
Q: If you create a PivotChart or Power View report, can Q&A show that chart when a user searches something relevant to the chart?
No, currently Power BI Q&A can only create Power View reports only the fly. It cannot reference preexisting reports and display those. You can however influence the way your data is presented by giving proper relationships, data types and data categories. Once a Power View report is created on the fly you can change the visualization easily by selecting the the chart type you would prefer.
Q: Can I export the results to Excel and/or PowerPoint?
The current use of Q&A is as a quick ad-hoc analysis tool and does not have an output like this although I think this is an interesting thought.
Q: Can i upload an Excel file to the Power BI site which is data connected to an SSAS source (locally hosted)?
You can as long as the SSAS source exposed through Power Pivot. If you want to refresh any locally hosted data sources then you must configure the Data Management Gateway to allow local data sources to interact with the Power BI cloud.
