Power BI

impressBox can display a live Microsoft Power BI report on your screens. The report is the real thing from Power BI, not a screenshot, so the numbers stay current on their own. You do not need a Power BI Embedded capacity for this — your own Power BI account is enough.

You connect Power BI to impressBox once, and from then on you turn any report into screen content just by pasting its link. There are two ways to do that: you can ask the impressBox assistant to do it for you, or you can build the content yourself from a ready-made template. Both end the same way — you add the content to a playlist and publish it to the screen.

What you need first

You need a Power BI report that you can open in your browser at app.powerbi.com, and a Microsoft work or school account that can see that report (a personal gmail or outlook.com address will not work with Power BI). One Power BI account can serve all of your screens, so this is normally the account your team already uses for Power BI.

Step 1 — Connect Power BI (one time)

Before the first report can appear on a screen, you link your Power BI account to impressBox. You do this once per impressBox account.

Open Connect Power BI in your account and sign in with your Microsoft account when the Microsoft window appears. Approve the access it asks for, and you are returned to impressBox with Power BI connected. impressBox stores only a secure token so it can keep showing your reports; it never sees your password, and the same connection then works for every screen on the account.

If you skip this step, do not worry — both methods below will offer you the Connect Power BI link at the moment it is needed, so you can connect and continue.

Step 2 — Create the content

Method A — Ask the impressBox assistant

The quickest way is to let the assistant do it. Open the report in Power BI, copy the link from your browser, and give it to the impressBox assistant — for example, "put this Power BI report on a screen" with the link pasted in. The assistant reads the report, workspace and page straight out of the link, so you do not have to find any IDs yourself, and it creates the screen content for you.

If your account has not connected Power BI yet, the assistant replies with a Connect Power BI link first. Open it, sign in with Microsoft once as in Step 1, then tell the assistant to go ahead and it finishes the job.

The assistant works both inside the impressBox chat and through the impressBox MCP connector, so it behaves the same whether you talk to it in the app or from an AI tool such as Claude.

Method B — Build it from the template

If you would rather do it by hand, create the content from the ready-made template.

  1. In your content library click CREATE NEW CONTENT, then choose Power BI (under Integrations). This opens the Power BI (User login) template — a live preview on the left, its fields on the right.

  2. Paste your report link into the Power BI report link field.

  3. Optionally set Duration on screen — how many seconds the report shows each time (10 by default).

  4. Click CREATE.

The Power BI (User login) template

The Power BI (User login) template


That is all that is required. The template reads the report, the workspace and the page from the link automatically, so the other fields — Report ID, Workspace / group ID, Page name and Connection — can stay empty; they are optional overrides. Leave Connection empty and the screen uses your own Power BI connection from Step 1. There are no IDs for you to look up.

Step 3 — Put it on a screen

From here a Power BI report behaves like any other content. Add it to a playlist and publish that playlist to the screen, exactly as you would for an image or a webpage (see Put a playlist on your screens (publishing)). The screen fetches a fresh view from Power BI and refreshes it on its own, so what you see on the wall keeps up with your data.

If the screen stays black

If the report does not appear and the screen is blank, it is almost always one of a few simple things. Check, in this order, that the playlist with the Power BI content has actually been published to that screen; that Power BI is connected on the account (Step 1) and the sign-in has not expired; and that the report is shared with the Microsoft account you connected, so that account is allowed to open it.

One setting worth knowing about: the Microsoft account you connect should not be forced to re-confirm its login (multi-factor re-authentication) on a schedule, because the screens sign in in the background. If that account is required to log in again periodically, the connection drops and the screens go blank until you reconnect. A dedicated account used only for the screens avoids this.

A note on "User login" vs "Embedded"

The template above is called Power BI (User login) because it signs in as your Power BI user. This is the option almost everyone wants: it needs no special Power BI capacity and works with a normal Power BI account. There is also an Embedded variant for organisations that run on Power BI Embedded capacity; if that applies to you, ask the impressBox team which template to use.

Rolling out to production

This feature is being rolled out across impressBox. If you are testing it early and a screen does not load a report yet, your account may still be waiting for the rollout to reach it — the impressBox team can confirm and switch it on.