In the past, Projility has seen the occasional support request regarding Power BI not exporting to PowerPoint the way users expected. Users would navigate to a report, then make the various project selections and drill downs. Once the users were happy with the report, they would export to PowerPoint. However, they would not see reflected in the PowerPoint output the various selections that they had just made in the Power BI report.
The reason they were not seeing the report changes reflected in PowerPoint was because the users had to actually edit the report, make their changes, and then save the report. I would agree that this was somewhat counterintuitive.
To my delight, I noticed this week that Microsoft has made a valuable update to Power BI. When you export to PowerPoint, Power BI displays the new ‘Export’ dialogue shown in the following figure. When you export to PowerPoint, you now have two options: you can select ‘Current Values’ or ‘Default Values’. The ‘Current Values’ option allows you to use the current selected values in the report, as opposed to the ‘Default Values’ selected when the report was last edited and saved.
Export dialog
The other new option is ‘Exclude Hidden Report Tabs’. When you select this option, any tabs that you may have hidden will not be displayed within the PowerPoint export. For me this is an equally big win.
With These two improvements, users are now able make changes to their reports “on the fly” as opposed to having to make hard edits to the report that would be stored permanently. A big win is that users no longer have to delete slides for them not to show up in the exported PowerPoint file, but the ultimate win is that it now will take less mouse clicks to export your data out of Power BI and into PowerPoint.