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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.