Getting Started with Power BI Development

To get started developing in Power BI you will need the following:

An excellent resource for getting started is to visit Power BI Documentation provided by Microsoft.

Planning Development Environment


When trying to plan out your development environment, you want to map your development lifecycle to how Power BI content is organized within the Power BI Service. The Power BI Service is structured around workspaces, each consisting of their own unique permissions/security.

The following are some planning guidelines.

       Planning Steps

  • Security: Determine which users/groups will need access to your Power BI workspaces.
  • Workspaces: Create the necessary workspaces to match your development lifecycle.
  • Application Lifecycle Management: If you maintain development, test, and production environments for your development workflow, you will want to plan your Power BI workspaces accordingly. A best practice is to create workspaces for each environment in your development workflow. Power BI provides a solution to facilitate your application lifecycle management called Power BI Deployment Pipelines.

Developing Power BI Content


Development guidelines change frequently as Microsoft updates Power BI functionality. It is a good habit to check this page for development best practices.  In this documentation, and Microsoft's, "the service" refers to the Power BI Cloud service rendered in your browser. "Power BI Desktop" refers to the authoring desktop tool installed on your local machine.  "Power BI" refers to the entire Microsoft Power BI Product line.

  1. Create a report using Power BI desktop. Reports can be edited in the service but it is best practice to edit in the desktop tool. 
  2. Publish the reports to a workspace.  By default, all users can publish to My workspace for initial development.
    1. For more information about publishing to the Power BI Service, go to Publish datasets and reports from Power BI Desktop.
  3. Separate the dataset from the report.
    1. By default Power BI Desktop creates two pbix files when publishing to the service, a dataset and a report. 
    2. Both have the same name. 
    3. It is best practice to rename the data set file adding the prefix "dataset_". 
    4. Then download the report file and connect to the dataset_ pbix file on the service.
    5. Republish the report. 
  1. Power BI Data Flows are the best choice for getting data for a report.
    1. They provide standardized configuration and data manage refresh and security to on-premise UCSB data. 
    2. For more information about dataflows, go to Getting Started with Dataflows.
    3. On the Get Data function in Power BI Desktop, select Power BI Platform and the Power BI data flows to create tables using data flows. 
    4. You can also connect directly to complete datasets by selecting Power BI Platform > Power BI data sets on the Get Data function in Power BI desktop.
  2. Testing and moving data to production requires multiple workspaces. 
    1. Typically development and test are available to a limited set of users.
    2. Best practice is to begin the workspace name with the prefix "ws_". 
    3. Development and test workspaces should be suffix by [Developement] and [Test] respectively.
    4. Production workspaces do not have a suffix.
    5. Use Power BI Deployment Pipelines to move data through the workspaces.
      1. For more information regarding workspace naming conventions best practices for UCSB, go to Power BI Naming Conventions.


Developer Resources