Power BI: OTTO's reporting vehicle

Power BI i.e.S. is the Power BI Desktop application that can be installed and used free of charge on a personal computer any time. Essentially, Power BI Desktop is the development environment for creating reports.

Besides this there’s the equally important cloud component: Power BI Service reports developed locally (in Power BI Desktop) are published here and therefore become visible and usable for other OTTO colleagues via the browser. 

The entire Power BI landscape can thus be displayed as follows:

As described above, Power BI Desktop is the development environment for reports and therefore an essential part of the Power BI infrastructure.

With Power BI Desktop you can do the following main tasks:

• Connect various data sources (Exasol, GCP, SharePoint and many more)
• Transform and combine connected data using Power Query
• Create a Local Data Model
• Create your own key figures based on the data model (=DAX)
• Import design themes (e.g. corporate design-compliant OTTO colours)
• Develop reports
• Test and optimize report performance
• Use external help tools (for advanced users) such as DAX Studio, Tabular Editor, etc.
• Define RLS (Row Level Security) or row-level permissions, i.e. decide who can see what
• Publish finished reports in Power BI Cloud and share them with your colleagues.

The entire process, from data connection to the completion and publication of the report with Power BI, can thus be mapped as follows:

Power BI Service is Power BI's cloud platform. Here, reports developed locally with Power BI Desktop are published and made accessible to other OTTO colleagues or report consumers.

To publish a report in Power BI Service you need a Workspace. There are 3 types of workspaces available in Power BI Service:

• Personal Workspace
• Regular Workspace
• Premium Workspace.

The Personal Workspace can be used at any time without additional licenses and is the only workspace that already exists by default after the first login (in Power BI Service) and cannot be removed. This Workspace can be used particularly for temporary reports, tests or other personal content that is not widely distributed.

By contrast, a Regular or standard Workspace must be created in addition to the Personal Workspace. You can do this independently at any time (in compliance with a few rules). The Regular Workspace is not linked to a specific person but is usually created for a specific department, team or project. 

A Premium Workspace provides additional capacity and features compared to the regular workspace, such as more storage space for reports or datasets, a higher refresh rate, and easier content-sharing.