Power BI for first-time users

What Power BI is
Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service
Where the report's data comes from
The words you will meet
Six clicks that make the report work
A dense page, one visual at a time

What Power BI is

Power BI reads data from a database, keeps a copy of it, and shows it as a page of visuals — charts, tables, figures and filter boxes — that all answer to each other: pick something in one, and every other visual on the page shows only what matches.

For a migration that means questions such as _how many files are older than five years_, _which libraries hold the most version history_ or _which files are still to be migrated_ are answered by a few clicks, not by a query or a spreadsheet.

The short version

SMART BI.pbix is a file. Open it in the free Power BI Desktop, click what interests you, and the whole page follows. Nothing you click changes the data or the migration.

Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service

Power BI comes in two forms, and the report works in both. The first is free for everyone and all most projects need; the second is optional, and the only part of Power BI with a licence fee.

Power BI Desktop — free for everyone

A program for Windows, free from Microsoft: no licence, no subscription and no Microsoft account needed to open and refresh a report. It opens .pbix files like Word opens .docx files. This is what SMART Migration's report is built for, and all most projects need.

The Power BI service — optional, with a licence fee

Microsoft's online portal, app.powerbi.com, for publishing reports within an organisation. Nothing in SMART Migration needs it. A .pbix file is published to it from Power BI Desktop, and the report is then read in the browser and can be refreshed on a schedule. Publishing and sharing need paid Power BI licences, and a database inside your network needs Microsoft's on-premises data gateway for the scheduled refresh.

	Power BI Desktop	Power BI service
Cost	Free, for everyone	A licence fee, per user or per capacity
Needed	Yes, to open the report	No — optional
Runs on	Windows	Any browser
Opens the report	As a file you download	Once someone has published it to a workspace
Refresh	By hand, with Refresh	By hand or on a schedule
Change the report	Everything	Most things, in the browser
Shared as	A file — mail, Team Folder, archive — that anyone opens for free	A link to the workspace, for licensed users

Free for everyone

Power BI Desktop is free, for everyone. Anyone can download it from Microsoft and open SMART BI.pbix at no cost — the project team, managers, auditors, the owners of each library, a partner or a customer. The report can therefore be shared as a file, by mail or in a Team Folder, and opened by whoever receives it, with no licence to buy.

Only the Power BI service — Microsoft's portal for publishing reports within an organisation — carries a licence fee. Publishing there is optional.

On a Mac there is no Power BI Desktop: use a Windows machine or virtual machine, or the Power BI service.
The app plays no part in the service. Neither the app nor Nextcloud talks to Power BI; publishing the report is your own step, outside the app, under your own Microsoft licences.
Microsoft's licences and their prices change; Microsoft's Power BI pricing page has the current ones.

Where the report's data comes from

The report never reads SharePoint, OneDrive, file shares or Nextcloud itself. Its data travels in three steps, and the Getting Started tab draws the same picture.

SMART Migration writes every file to the reporting database
Every Discovery and Migration run records each file it handled — where it is, its size, versions, dates, labels, metadata and what happened to it — in the PostgreSQL reporting database.
A refresh copies that data into the file
Someone who can reach the database opens SMART BI.pbix in Power BI Desktop and clicks Refresh. The data is copied into the file.
The file carries its own data from then on
Anyone can open the saved file — no database, no credentials, no network path and no SMART Migration. Every visual draws on the copy inside it.

So the report shows the migration as it was at its last refresh: refresh it again to see newer runs.

The copy is held in the computer's memory while the report is open, and a refresh needs up to twice that. For a migration of tens of millions of files, that takes a well-equipped computer — 64–96 GB of memory is not uncommon. See Size the servers for a large migration The Dashboard's Power BI box, beside Progress, offers every copy uploaded to the team folder, the latest first.

The words you will meet

Word	What it means in the report
Report	The whole `.pbix` file: one or more pages.
Page	One screen of the report, chosen in the tabs along its bottom edge.
Visual	Any one box on a page: a chart, a table, a figure or a filter.
Slicer	A visual that filters: a list to tick, a drop-down, a search box or a range with two handles.
Card	A visual showing one figure, such as `File count` or `Total volume`.
Measure	A calculation, such as the total volume of the files picked; it follows every filter.
Refresh	Copying the latest data from the reporting database into the file.

Six clicks that make the report work

These work on every page of the report, in Power BI Desktop and in the service alike.

Pick a value in a slicer
Tick a value — a job group, a file type, a retention label — and every visual on the page shows only the files that match. Hold Ctrl to tick several. Type in a slicer's Search box to find a value in a long list.
Click a part of a chart
Click a slice of a donut or a bar, and the other visuals filter to it, or highlight their share of it. Ctrl+click picks several parts; click the same part again to let go.
Point at anything to read it
Hold the pointer over a bar, a slice or a cell, and a tooltip shows its exact figures.
Clear a filter
Point at a slicer and click its eraser icon to clear what it picked. The report's Clear all filters button clears every slicer on the page at once.
Use a button: Ctrl+click in Power BI Desktop
In Power BI Desktop a button on the page — such as Clear all filters — is used with Ctrl+click, as the report's buttons say; a plain click only selects it for editing. In the Power BI service a plain click is enough.
Open a visual's menu
Point at a visual and click More options (…) in its top-right corner: Show as a table lists the figures behind a chart, Sort orders it, and Export data saves what it shows.

Nothing you click can break anything

Slicers, clicks and Focus mode change only what you see. They change neither the data, nor the migration, nor the file — unless you save it, and even then only which filters it opens with.

A dense page, one visual at a time

The report's pages hold many visuals at once, so that every filter is in reach. To read one in comfort, open it full screen: point at the visual and click the Focus mode icon in its top-right corner. The visual fills the window, still filtered by everything picked on the page; Back to report, in the top-left corner, returns to the page.

Focus mode is standard Power BI and works on every visual. Some of the report's visuals say so in their title — Decomposition tree -> Focus mode, Tree map -> Focus mode — because they are much easier to explore full screen.

See also