How to Transfer Power BI to PowerPoint

You’ve built an insightful, data-rich report in Power BI, but now it’s time to present your findings to the team, your boss, or a client. The default platform for that crucial conversation? Almost always PowerPoint. This article will show you exactly how to bring your interactive Power BI visuals into your PowerPoint slides, transforming your presentations from simple static reports into dynamic, data-driven stories.

Static vs. Live Data: First, Pick Your Approach

Before you copy anything over, it’s important to understand the two main ways to include Power BI visuals in PowerPoint. Your choice will depend on your audience, your data's sensitivity, and the story you want to tell.

• Static Image: This is a snapshot of your data at a single moment in time. Think of it as a carefully captured screenshot. It's perfect for quarterly reports, historical analysis, or when you need to share a fixed view of the data without anyone being able to filter or change it. It’s fast, simple, and always reliable.
• Live Data: This embeds an interactive, up-to-date Power BI report directly onto your slide. Your audience can use slicers, apply filters, and drill down into the data right there in your presentation. This method is ideal when you need the most current information and want to answer follow-up questions on the fly by exploring the data together.

We’ll cover the best techniques for both, starting with the most powerful and officially supported method for live data.

The Gold Standard: Using the Official Power BI Add-in for PowerPoint

If you want live, interactive reports inside your presentation, the free Microsoft Power BI add-in is the best solution by far. It's a secure way to bring the full Power BI experience directly into your slides, maintaining your organization's data governance and permissions.

Step 1: Install the Power BI Add-in

First, you need to add the tool to your PowerPoint ribbon. You only need to do this once.

1. Open PowerPoint and go to a new or existing presentation.
2. Click the Insert tab on the top ribbon.
3. Click the Get Add-ins button.
4. In the Office Add-ins store that pops up, use the search bar to look for "Microsoft Power BI."
5. Click Add next to the official Microsoft Power BI add-in. Accept the terms and conditions.

You’ll now see a Power BI icon in your Insert ribbon, ready whenever you need it.

Step 2: Get the URL of Your Power BI Report

Next, you’ll need the link to the report you want to embed. This link isn’t public, it acts as an address that the add-in uses to find your report within your secure Power BI environment.

1. Open your web browser and navigate to the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com).
2. Open the specific report you want to embed. You can even apply filters or use slicers to get the exact starting view you want to present on the slide.
3. Copy the entire URL from your browser's address bar. It will look something like https://app.powerbi.com/groups/me/reports/...

Step 3: Insert the Report into Your PowerPoint Slide

Now, head back to your PowerPoint presentation.

1. Go to the slide where you want to add the report.
2. Click the Power BI icon in your Insert tab.
3. A placeholder box will appear on your slide with a field to paste your report URL.
4. Paste the Power BI URL you copied earlier into this field and click the Insert button.

The add-in will connect to the Power BI service. You may need to sign in to your Microsoft account to verify your identity. Once it loads, your live Power BI report will appear right on the slide. You can resize and reposition the box containing your report just like any other PowerPoint object.

Tips for Using the Add-in Effectively

• Set your view with Bookmarks: To save specific views (like a chart filtered for a particular region or product line), use the Bookmarks feature in Power BI. Each bookmark has a unique URL. Use these URLs in the add-in to create different slides, each telling a distinct part of your data story.
• Remember permissions: Anyone viewing the presentation needs to have permission to view the report in Power BI Service. If they don’t, they will see a login prompt or a 'permission denied' message on the slide. Before your big meeting, make sure you've shared the report with your colleagues via Power BI itself.
• Use the "Save as Image" feature: Sometimes you need the live data for yourself but want to prevent your audience from getting distracted by clicking around during the presentation. The add-in has a great feature for this. Click the embedded report, and in the top-right corner of its frame, select the View Options icon (it looks like a small chart) and choose Show as Saved Image. This freezes the current view as a static image, removing all interactivity until you switch it back.

For Quick Static Snapshots: Exporting and Screenshots

If you don't need a live, interactive dashboard, creating static images is much faster. This is perfect for capturing a specific data point from a specific time to support your narrative.

Option A: Export a Visual Directly as an Image

Power BI has a built-in feature to export any individual chart or graph as a clean image file. This is better than a manual screenshot because it crops the visual perfectly for you.

1. In Power BI service or Desktop, hover your mouse over the visual you want to use.
2. Click the three-dot menu (...) that appears in the corner.
3. Select Export data from the dropdown menu.
4. In the new window, make sure you've selected "Summarized data" and under format, choose whether you want a .xlsx or .csv of the data along with your visual. To just get the picture, pick .png or use current layout.
5. Save the image file to your computer.
6. Back in PowerPoint, go to the Insert tab, click Pictures, and select the image file you just saved.

Option B: Use System Screenshot Tools

When you want to capture more than one visual at a time or include surrounding text and context, a good old-fashioned screenshot is your best friend. Modern tools make this quick and clean.

• Windows: Use the Snip & Sketch tool (you can quickly access it by pressing Win + Shift + S). This lets you draw a rectangle around the exact area you want to capture. The image is copied to your clipboard, so you can just paste it (Ctrl + V) directly onto your PowerPoint slide.
• macOS: Press Shift + Command + 4. Your cursor will turn into a crosshair. Click and drag to select the part of the screen you want to capture. The screenshot will save to your desktop, and you can then insert it into your slide.

For High-Quality Reports: Exporting to a PDF

Sometimes screenshot quality isn’t quite high enough, especially if the slide will be printed or viewed on a very large screen. To preserve pristine quality, you can export the entire report page as a PDF first.

In the Power BI service, go to your dashboard, click File > Export > Export to PDF. This creates a high-resolution, perfectly laid-out PDF of your report page.

From here, you have two options:

1. Open the PDF and use your screenshot tool to capture a very high-quality image of a single visual from that page.
2. Import the entire PDF page directly. In PowerPoint's Insert tab, select Object, choose "Create from File," and browse for your PDF file. This can sometimes affect formatting, so importing it as an image often works better.

This method is excellent for sharing complete report views in the appendix of your presentation or as handouts for your audience.

Best Practices for Presenting Data in PowerPoint

Simply getting your data into the slides is only half the battle. How you present it matters just as much. Here are a few tips:

• One Slide, One Insight: Don’t just dump a busy, complex dashboard onto a slide and ask "Any questions?" It’s overwhelming. Each slide should have a clear purpose. Use a descriptive slide title as the takeaway (e.g., "Q3 Social Media Campaigns Doubled Our Inbound Leads”) and then show the Power BI visual that proves your point. Use the Power BI Bookmarks feature to create these specific views in advance.
• Focus on the Story: Your data should support a narrative. Start with the big picture, drill down into influential details, and end with a clear conclusion or recommendation. Use multiple slides with filtered Power BI visuals to walk your audience through your analysis step-by-step.
• Know Your Audience: If you're presenting to a highly analytical team, they will probably love an interactive report they can explore with you. If you're presenting to senior leadership, they may just want the key takeaways. For them, a static image with clear callouts might be more effective and keep the meeting on track.

Final Thoughts

Integrating your Power BI reports into PowerPoint elevates your presentations from simple slide decks to compelling, data-driven narratives. For live, interactive analysis, the official Microsoft Power BI add-in is the most secure and powerful solution available. For quick shares or fixed reports, exporting visuals as images or PDFs provides clean, high-quality snapshots.

While these methods are excellent for pulling your final reports together, we know that getting to that final report across many marketing and sales platforms is still a huge manual lift. We created Graphed because we believe data analysis shouldn't take hours out of your week. By connecting sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, Salesforce, and Facebook Ads in seconds, you can simply ask questions in plain English - like "create a sales performance dashboard by rep for this quarter" - and get a real-time dashboard instantly, skipping the tedious report-building process altogether.