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Quickly create reports in the Power BI service (preview)

Headshot of article author Amanda Rivera

We’re excited to introduce a new way to quickly create reports in the Power BI service. Rather than downloading Power BI Desktop and importing the data, you’ll now be able to paste data straight into Power BI on the web and have visuals automatically generated for you.

Gif showing the enter quick create process. Steps are described in text in the below blog post.

In Power BI’s left navigation pane, you’ll now see a Create button (also accessible from the Create button on Home) that opens a page where you can select your data source.

Create button in the left navigation pane of the Power BI service. Icon looks like the Plus sign

Currently, we only support creating a report off an existing dataset or typing/pasting data directly in, but you’ll see other sources, such as uploading an Excel file, appear over time.

Shows the 2 data sources options available, either pasting or manually entering data or connecting to an existing published dataset

When you choose to type or paste data, you’ll get a grid which you can start to type into, or paste with Ctrl-V or the context menu.

The enter data dialog that allows you type or paste in data you want to visual in Power BI

You can also add and remove columns from the context menu, and if your pasted data includes a header row you can click Use first row as headers to automatically promote the first row to the header row. Power BI will automatically detect the data types, but you have the option to manually set them through the data type button to the left of the column name.

Data type dropdown for a column within the enter data view. Example options include Whole Number, Text, Date, True/False, and Binary.

When you go through the Create flow, Power BI creates a new dataset for you and auto-generates a summarized view of your data. These auto-generated visuals propel you from raw data to rich insights faster than ever.

An example report that was autogenerated for the user based on the user's data. It has 6 bar charts and 2 cards showing units sold and discounts split by products, Segment, and Country. It also has a table showing all the data.

Changing what data you see in the report is easier than ever as well. You can use the Summarize pane to add or remove fields from the report. Simply select and unselect fields to update what you want to measure and analyze by, and you’ll see charts automatically added or removed to show all combinations.

Currently you can see a max of three measures, shown as rows within the report, and 4 categories, shown as columns within the report.

Summarize Pane with default fields selected

If you want to see a field summarized in a different way, you can use the context menu of the field in the Summarize pane to switch between sum/average/max/min etc.

Available summarize options, including Sum, Average, Minimum, Maximum, Count (Distinct), Count, Standard deviation, Variance, and Median.

This report can be saved to the workspace you were in when you first clicked “Create”. From there you can share it out, just like any other report. The next time you or anyone with edit permissions opens the report, you’ll land right back in this quick edit experience.

If you want to switch into a full edit experience, you can click the edit button in the app bar. Be aware though, that once you save the report in the full edit experience, you will not be able to go back to the quick edit view.

Edit button in the app bar

We hope this experience will make it easier to create reports on your data and unlock the power of report building to a whole new set of users. We plan on adding more capabilities and improvements in the future, such as adding an option to import Excel files. We’re also planning to extend our SharePoint integration with a new capability for lists similar to Power Apps and Power Automate that will take advantage of this new create flow.

We greatly appreciate any feedback, so we can continue to improve the experience. Try out this new Create experience today, and if you have any feedback, please let us know through this survey.