Add Embedded code to PowerBI dashboard

This is something I pulled in during a recent PoC of PowerBI. Its a very powerful built in feature of PowerBI that, I feel, has one visual draw back that I will document towards the end of this post. I am utilising the Web Content tile in PowerBI which can essentially be populated with any embedded code. Ill demonstrate its use below using the twitter feed.

Retrieve the source code

The first thing we need to do here is to go to the source to grab the required code. In this case it would be twitter: https://publish.twitter.com/. From here it is fairly straight forward to pick the options you want & define the feed/user etc that you want to display. Ive used SQLBits’ twitter feed as an example here. I hope they dont mind 🙂

From this screen you can copy the code which outputs as below:

<a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/SQLBits">Tweets by SQLBits</a> 
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Update your Dashboard

Going back to your PowerBI Dashboard, click Add Tile in the top right menu, selecting Web Content.

As you can see there are a few options you can set to add title & description as well as a custom click through link.

Hitting Apply adds the tile to your dashboard which you can see below alongside a quick Execution log donut chart I have added.

NOTE: There is a “Grey Shield” warning in the corner of any tile you add that contains external content. I have yet to find a way to remove or hide this warning but will update this post if I do. In my opinion it detracts from the clean feel of the dashboard and shouldn’t be a permanent fixture.