From the course: Power BI Data Visualization and Dashboard Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Differentiate Power BI Desktop and Service - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Power BI Data Visualization and Dashboard Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Differentiate Power BI Desktop and Service

“

- [Instructor] Did you know there are two versions of Power BI and you need both to unlock its full potential? These two tools are called Desktop and Service, and they're complimentary offerings. The first thing to note is that you cannot use Power BI Desktop on a Mac, only works on PCs. Service, being web-based can be used by both PCs and Macs. Imagine building a beautiful report, but being unable to publish it where you want. That's what lies ahead of you if you were to only use Desktop. Now, imagine creating and publishing an amazing report, but being unable to handle the data properly. That's a life with only Power BI Service in it. You need both of them to get the most Out of Power BI, and we're going to explore the differences between the two to save you hours of frustration. Let's compare them with this Venn diagram. You need to read across from left to right to compare on certain features, and the bold font indicates which offering is stronger in this area. Desktop gives you the full report editing experience. You can use color themes, custom visuals, and more. You can build reports in Service as well, and it's constantly catching up with Desktop, but it's not quite as good. Desktop is definitely the best when it comes to data. It offers you model view where you can visualize relationships between fields and tables of data and change them. You can create complex formula using something called DAX and Desktop also supports a wider variety of data sources and allows you to create advanced calculations. You can define something called measures which aggregate your data into a single value, and you can insert calculated columns, which apply formally to create completely new fields, such as adding two columns together. But Service is not without any offering in this area. It does give you the ability to schedule your data to refresh. Power BI Desktop is constantly in edit mode. This means the visuals are always free to use, even custom visuals because licensing checks only really kick in in view mode, which is only an option in Power BI Service where you can toggle between editing and reading views. Service comes into its own when it comes to collaboration and distribution. If you want to share a desktop report, you have to attach it as a file and send it in an email. With Service, you can publish to the web, you can embed it within a SharePoint or a different website, you can share via a Teams tab, You can export to PowerPoint. There are lots and lots of options. You can also set permissions and governance in the Service. Service also lets you build dashboards which can show real time data and trigger alerts and emails. It lets you organize your reports into project areas called workspaces and bundle your dashboards and reports into applications. There is basically an implied workflow. You are meant to prepare your data and create your reports in Desktop, then publish them to Service where you can manage the permissions and onward distribution. I hope that's been a useful summary of the difference between Desktop and Service. Now let's dive into both of them.

Contents