Table of Contents
To make good decisions about the future of your business, you and your team need to be informed. There are a lot of solutions out there to help you visualize your intelligence through reports, graphs, and charts - but one of the most powerful and popular is Microsoft Power BI.
It’s easy to use, and you can generate comprehensive reports with up-to-the-minute analytics about your business — empowering the key players in your team to make informed choices about the future of your organization.
Fugo & your Power BI data
The app allows you to sign in directly with your Power BI account, and then choose a report or dashboard to display. You can choose the way the Report or Dashboard displays, and even decide whether to animate it scrolling so that you can fit more data onto your digital signage — Super handy stuff!
This is a little different from displaying your Power BI Dashboards and Reports via the TV Dashboards feature, which is really helpful in getting dashboards to display on your signage but doesn’t integrate directly with Power BI the way this app does.
💡 Note: If you want to see your Power BI dashboard/report on screen at the end of configuration, make sure it's connected to Fugo CMS. If you haven’t connected your screen(s) yet, you can find the instructions for your preferred device in our hardware collection.
How to configure the Power BI app in Fugo
There are two ways to add content with Fugo - via our playlist builder and in our Design Studio. We’ll cover the steps for both methods in each section.
Using the playlist builder
1. Log into your Fugo Account. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.
2. Click Apps in the top navigation bar to get to our app store.
3. Locate the Power BI app (you can search for it to move things along) and click Try App.
Note that the Power BI app is a Premium app, meaning that it's available on the Core & Enterprise plans only.
4. A window will pop up where you'll be prompted to either create a new playlist for the app or add the app to an existing playlist.
Choose how you'd like to proceed and & click Continue.
5. Now you're ready to configure the app.
Click authorize in to sign in to your Power BI account. A popup window will open asking you to sign in once you click this.
6. After entering your account details and signing in, the app will fetch your Reports and Dashboards, ready to display them on your digital signage.
Using the drop downs, select the specific dashboard or report that you want to display.
💡 Note that each instance of the Power BI app can only display one page or report at a time. So, if you want to display every page of a multi-page report/dashboard, you'll need to configure a new instance for each page.
7. Once you’ve selected a report or dashboard page, you’ll have the option to configure Slicers. Slicers let you filter your data by specific categories, dates, regions, or other parameters, helping you display the most relevant data for your audience.
Use the Page Slicers panel on the right side of the configuration window to toggle on or off the desired filters.
Adjust slicer settings to refine the displayed data. For instance:
Select specific Years (e.g., CY2018, CY2019, CY2020)
Filter by Category (e.g., Glider, Trainer, Warbird)
Narrow down data by Region (e.g., Midwest, Northeast, Pacific Northwest)
Once you’ve customized your slicers, click Save Changes to apply your filters.
💡 Tip: Adjusting slicers allows you to create tailored views for different screens or audiences, making your dashboards more dynamic and contextually relevant.
8. If you have a particularly long dashboard and you want to designate a certain portion of it to display on screen, you can use the SCROLLING feature to set the pixel dimensions of the part of the dashboard Fugo displays.
You may need to set the height (in pixels) by trial & error.
Check out the video below for a helpful explainer 👇
9. If you want Fugo to use our screenshotting method to capture & display your dashboard, toggle the setting for SCREENSHOT on.
☝️ What do you mean by "screenshotting?"
As described above, the app typically uses the Power BI API to load your dashboard directly on your screen or player. However, the screenshot method doesn’t use the API. Instead, it opens your Power BI dashboard in a virtual browser on a Cloud server and captures a screenshot. The screenshot is then sent to your screen and automatically refreshed at set intervals.
🤔 Why would I want to use the screenshot method for my dashboards instead of loading them directly on my player?
My dashboard is too intensive
Some dashboards have massive amounts of data (e.g., millions of rows) that take a significant amount of time for Microsoft's servers to process. Even if you're using a powerful player, the dashboards can take too long to fully load, especially if you're displaying them for a short duration. The screenshot method helps avoid these delays by displaying an updated image of the dashboard, ensuring a smoother experience.
My screen or player's browser is too old to support Power BI
Power BI is only supported on the two most recent versions of Chrome. If your screen or player uses an older browser, Power BI won't work for you.
The screenshot method solves this issue by rendering the dashboard in a Cloud server, bypassing the need for your device to handle it directly.
10. If you've enabled the screenshot method for your dashboard, you can use the PAUSE function to tell Fugo how long to wait before taking the screenshot of your dashboard. This will give any complex or slow-loading dashboards time to fully load before taking the screenshot.
Input the time - in seconds - that you want Fugo to pause before taking the screenshot.
11. Set the duration of the app - that is, how long the app displays within a slideshow of other content - in the DURATION (SECONDS) field.
Click Save Changes when you're done.
12. Your Power BI app instance will now be listed as a slide in your playlist.
If you want to display one or several more dashboard/reports, you'll need to create a new instance of the app for each dashboard by clicking Add More Content and configuring more instances of the app.
💡 By default, apps & other slide content configured in the playlist builder will fill the full dimensions of the screen & play as a standard slideshow - one after the other.
If you want to customize the look and feel of your dashboards (by, say, adding a ticker text or local time, etc) to your Power BI slide, you can do that in the Design Studio. We'll cover that in the next section: Using the Design Studio.
To continue on to publishing instructions from here, you can skip to section 3: How to publish the app to your screen/s.
Using the Design Studio
1. Click Studio in the top navigation bar. Then click Create in Studio to start a new design.
2. This will open up a blank canvas for you to start adding content to! To add the Fugo app, either scroll to find it in the Apps menu to the right or search for it to find it faster.
3. Click the app or drag and drop to add it onto your canvas.
💡 You can drag the sizing handles of the app around to change the size. Make it smaller so you can split your screen and add other content, or make it full screen - that’s totally up to you!
4. Customizing the Power BI app settings works the same way in the Design Studio - all settings will be found in the panel to the left. To bring up the panel, click on the app from the canvas.
You can continue to customize your content however you wish in the studio! Some ideas to customize this might be:
Add your company logo the slide
Crop the app to visually highlight key parts of your dashboard
Add text boxes and scrolling ticker texts with important messages, reminders, or requests pertaining to your dashboards or data initiatives
Add QR codes to your display to create calls to action for your colleagues pertaining to your dashboards or workflows
Incorporate other apps & integrations into the display, such as the World Clock app or CNN app to grab attention with live updating headlines
In my example, I've customized my slide to display to fit my dashboard into a rounded frame with a drop shadow. I've also added the local time and date, along with a Google News ticker on the bottom.
When you’re satisfied with how your content looks, click Save and Close. This will close out the design studio. To publish this content, you’ll need to add it to a playlist, which we’ll cover in the next section.
How to publish the app to your screen/s
Note: If you want to add content you created in the studio to a playlist, you’ll need to navigate to the Playlists page by clicking Playlists in the top navigation bar and Create Playlist to start a new playlist.
That's where we'll pick up our instructions below.
1. Give your playlist a name (we suggest making it something relevant to distinguish it from other playlists later on down the road.) I'll call mine "Customer Profitability Tracker."
2. Click Select Screens to choose where to publish your playlist. You can publish this playlist to one, or multiple screens.
3. If you used the playlist builder to configure the app, you'll already see it listed under the Content for your playlist.
If you used the Studio to configure the app, you'll need to click Select Content and select it from the Studio Content tab in content picker.
3. You can also add more content to your playlist by clicking Add More Content and choosing other apps, uploading media, or from the content that you created in the studio.
If you're going to add more pages of a report or dashboard, you will do so by adding more content and configuring an instance of the app for each page.
4. When you've selected all the content items you want to add to this playlist, you're ready to put it on screen or schedule it!
Click Preview it to see what it will look like on screen.
To publish it to screen right away, click Publish. This is will send it to your screen/s right away & play it indefinitely until you unpublish it.
To save it & come back to later, click Finish later.
To get specific about what dates, days, and times this playlist runs, you can use the Schedule. Learn more about scheduling capabilities in our playlists collection.
How often will my dashboard/report refresh on screen?
Once configured & published to screen/s - there's no manual intervention you need to do to set a refresh interval or update your dashboard in Power BI. Fugo will automatically fetch the latest data each time your app comes up within the content rotation.
Troubleshooting the Power BI app
Grant Admin Consent for fugo.ai
If the app is not working for you (i.e. you are seeing an internal server error) one thing you can do to try to help is to grant admin consent for fugo.ai in your Azure portal.
Navigate to the Azure portal and go to the Enterprise Applications page.
Locate the application named "Fugo CMS" within the applications list.
Access the Permissions tab for the Fugo CMS application.
Click the prominent blue button to grant admin consent.
Enable your users' ability to request Admin Consent
Inside your Azure portal, go to your Enterprise Applications page.
Navigate to the Consent and permissions tab under Security
Click into the Admin consent settings tab
Look for an option to let you or your team send an email asking for admin consent.
You'll get an email with a link—admins just need to follow it to give the green light.
See how 👇
For more detailed info, check out Microsoft's article on permissions needing admin consent.
Need more help?
We’ve worked really hard to get this feature up and running, and we’d love to hear what you think about it! You can email us at support@fugo.ai to let us know, or if you have any questions or are having trouble getting the Power BI Dashboards app working with your signage just drop us an email and we’ll help you get things set up.
To get started and integrate your Power BI Dashboards with Fugo, you can sign up for a 14 day free trial here.