Microsoft Approved: Zebra BI visuals for Power BI are now certified!

In March 2020 Zebra BI reached one of our most important milestones in the company history: Microsoft certified both Zebra BI Tables and Zebra BI Chart Visual! This guarantees that Zebra BI visuals are completely secure and allows you to take advantage of a few important features only available with certified visuals.

This achievement is a result of a long thorough process and several detailed code reviews by Microsoft. We couldn't be more excited and honored to become a part of the highly selective group of Microsoft-certified add-ins for Power BI.

Certified Power BI visuals are Power BI visuals in AppSource that meet the Microsoft Power BI security and other code requirements. These visuals are thoroughly tested by Microsoft to verify that they don't access any external services or resources and that they follow secure coding patterns and guidelines.

The certification badge is displayed in the AppSource:

What does this mean for our users?

• Exporting to PDF and PowerPoint from the Power BI (cloud) service
• Printing from Power BI service
• Email subscriptions

Exporting to PDF and PowerPoint

One of the most important benefits of Zebra BI visuals being certified by Microsoft is the ability to export your Power BI reports with Zebra BI visuals directly from the Power BI (cloud)! You can do it in a form of a PDF or PowerPoint presentation.

What is even better is the fact that this is done in just a few simple clicks. When you open your report, click on Export and choose your preferred export format:

Once you perform this action, Power BI will check all of your report pages (warning: this can take a little bit of time...) and produce a nicely rendered PDF document or PowerPoint presentation:

Email subscriptions - send automated emails to your end-users

With this frequently overlooked but very useful feature you can send automated emails based on your published Power BI reports to your end-users (consumers) on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis. As an additional bonus, you can send these emails to an unlimited number of recipients into their favorite email client. Yay! 🙌

Want to hear more? You can schedule these emails for every Power BI report published in the Power BI service, select the exact days, the time of day when an email should be sent, write the email subject and an optional message, control the start and end date of each email subscription, etc.

Quite impressive, right?

Let's get down to business. To set up email subscriptions, first click on the Subscribe button in Power BI service:

You'll be presented with a form where you set the details of this email subscription on the right-side of your window:

After selecting the subscribers (users who will get these emails) and writing an engaging Subject to your brand new email, make sure you select the most appropriate schedule. For example, on a weekly basis, you can select the exact days when the emails will be sent out, as well as the exact scheduled time of the day (based on the selected time zone):

As you can see from the above pictures, you can simply set the start date and the end date of each subscription.

Friendly advice: by default, the emails will include a link to the whole Power BI report. If you want to restrict your users to a mere preview of a selected page in your report (and NOT give them the option to view the whole report), then just clear the checkbox under Also include (link to report in Power BI).

Interactive example on Zebra BI visual

Zebra BI visuals for Power BI are advanced visuals that will make your Power BI reports and dashboards pop:

Time to give it a spin!

Are you already using the AppSource version of Zebra BI (version 4.0.0 or higher)? If yes, we have a great news for you! Your Zebra BI has been automatically updated via the Microsoft's AppSource marketplace and all the above mentioned features are working for you as we speak! 👏

But, don't worry if that is not the case. If you're using an older version of Zebra BI (e.g., 3.x.x or older), then this might be the perfect opportunity to update your Zebra BI! We'll be happy to help, so when you're ready just shoot us an email at support@zebrabi.com and we'll help you migrate to the latest version. 💪

Haven't tried Zebra BI before? We got you, opt in for our 30-day free trial here: