Best way to connect and publish dashboard out of power BI

[Lanssens]

Hi,

let me explain the situation first:

For the company I work for I've made a access database which is accessible to multiple users through a series of forms.
I've split the original access file so I'd have a front and back-end of the database.

This works, the back-end file is located on a shared network drive and everything is fine.

The next part is extracting the data out of the access database and publish this data in a dashboard.
And this is the part that I'm not sure about. I first tried in Excel with powerview, but I found that powerview is pretty much restricted in a number of ways.

This was the moment I found out about Power BI, I checked and found out that some even use it at work.
Let me summarize what we have at work:
- Office 2013 (this will get a major update in the short future)
- Power BI
- SharePoint

We all work on thin-clients, so we don't use actual computers, we work entirely in the cloud.

This has the disadvantage that I can't install the power Bi desktop.
I can however open power BI online through SharePoint but for some reason I'm not able to open and connect to an access database this way.

So what should I do? I want to create a dashboard that uses the latest data and that I can share with others.

Thanks on advance for helping me out.

[v-haibl-msft]

@Lanssens

In this scenario, I think you can connect to your access database using Excel 2013 according to this document. Upload this excel file to OneDrive, then use Power BI Service to get data from OneDrive and import excel data into Power BI.

Best Regards,

Herbert

[BhaveshPatel]

Hi There,

You can connect to your access database and pulled your data into powerbi. 

If you have office 2013 with powerpivot installed, you can create a datamodel in Excel 2013 and upload the same data model with PowerBI Cloud. 

You can utilize Q & A feature of  online service to create stunning dashboards and reports on top of ypur datamodel and can also connect live with Excel by exploring the option of Analyze in Excel.

Hope I have answered your question. Let me know if you need further help.