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Announcing Power BI in Microsoft Teams collaboration experiences improvements

Headshot of article author Lukasz Pawlowski

It’s January and we’re excited to start the year on the right foot by announcing enhancements to the Power BI in Microsoft Teams experiences. Today we’re announcing three new capabilities that are starting to roll out, and a hint about things to look forward to in the coming weeks.

 

Rich preview cards for Chat in Teams

We’re committed to helping users communicate insights faster. The Chat in Teams experience is getting better because we’re updating Chat in Teams links to be easier to read, shorter, and to show rich preview cards.

When you use Chat in Teams for a report or from a visual, you’ll notice the link now looks like a regular Power BI link, not a Microsoft Teams link. The link is still a deep link that takes users directly to the exact data they selected on the specific page of a report. Clicking the link opens the report in a browser window.

Updated Chat in Teams experience showing the updated link format.

 

The experience gets even better when you have the Power BI app installed in Teams. The link will automatically generate a rich preview card. The card shows the report name, description, workspace, and an open button the opens the report in the Power BI app in Teams for a seamless experience.

Updated Chat in Teams experience showing the new rich preview card.

 

Listening and learning from your experiences and needs

On the Power BI team, we cherish user feedback, our community, and strive to improve our products to make it easier, faster, and more delightful for you to get your work done. We always encourage users to ask for features on ideas.powerbi.com, where you can track progress and vote for capabilities suggested by other users. Most Teams users don’t know they can do that.

Now, we’re enabling a new Give us feedback option for Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 users in the Power BI app. You’ll find the new option in the header bar on home.

Power BI app in Microsoft Teams with the new Give us feedback option in the app header.

 

When you press Give us feedback, we’ll launch a survey dialog.

Screenshot of the new Give us feedback option button.

 

In the dialog, you can rate your experience and tell us how we can improve the experience.

The new feedback survey for Power BI in Microsoft Teams.

Users can submit the survey whenever they feel they’d like us to improve something or even to offer us encouragement 😊. Similar surveys are available for Power BI in Outlook and Power BI in Microsoft 365 (office.com).

If you’d like to track your feature suggestions, continue to use ideas.powerbi.com. Remember to mention Microsoft Teams, Outlook, or Microsoft 365/Office.com so we can easily find them.

 

Upgrade for legacy Power BI tabs is coming soon for Channels 2.0

When we first started our Power B in Microsoft Teams journey, we released an early version of the Power BI tab with limited viewing experiences that worked in Team’s channels capability.

Now, with Team’s Channels 2.0 experiences these legacy tabs need to be upgraded. We’re enabling upgrade experiences now so that when channels 2.0 is enabled for your team, you can smoothly upgrade. Once you upgrade, your team will have access to the richer capabilities of the latest Power BI tab.

Don’t worry if you never get prompted to upgrade a Power BI tab. All newly created Power BI tabs already use the latest version of our Power BI tab and won’t need to upgrade. In fact, the vast majority of Power BI tabs in use today are not legacy tabs. This means that most users and teams won’t need to upgrade their tabs.

 

More to come

We’re really excited by how these updates will help users collaborate more quickly. And we have more updates based on your feedback coming soon that you can look forward to. While we won’t get into details in this blog post, here are few hints of what’s to come. Can anyone guess what they are?

We know users want to add more things to the Power BI tab. So, we’ve got several really great updates coming very soon to make organizational content easier to share in the Power BI tab.

We also know users use Power BI in Teams alongside lots of chats, channel conversations, and meetings. We’re working on improvements to help you context switch better.

As always, let us know what you think and how we can keep improving. Use the new Give us feedback option, ideas.powerbi.com, or leave a comment on this blog post below.