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Power BI App Guide

Learn how to visualize your Power BI reports & dashboards on office TV screens with the Fugo Power BI app.

Written by Fugo Support

Table of contents


Fugo & your Power BI data

If your team already lives in Power BI, getting that data in front of people shouldn't mean a dedicated laptop plugged into a TV, a browser tab someone has to remember to refresh, or a screenshot that's out of date by lunchtime.

Fugo's Power BI app connects directly to your Power BI account and keeps a report or dashboard live on any screen you point it at - sales numbers on the office floor, ops metrics in the warehouse, KPIs in the boardroom - with no manual refreshing and no separate device to maintain.

For the people looking at the screen: pick the report or dashboard once, and it just stays current. Fugo re-fetches the latest data automatically every time it comes up in rotation, so what's on screen always matches what's in Power BI. You can also apply slicers so the same underlying report shows a different filtered view per screen (e.g. each store or region sees only its own numbers) without building separate reports.

For IT and Power BI admins: the app authenticates through your organization's existing Power BI/Entra sign-in, so access follows the permissions you've already set up. You can choose whether Fugo renders dashboards live via the Power BI API, or via a periodic screenshot instead - screenshot mode handles dashboards with heavy datasets that are too slow to reload repeatedly on a signage player, and screens running older or embedded browsers that don't meet Power BI's minimum Chrome version requirement.

This is different from Fugo's generic Dashboards feature, which connects to other BI and reporting tools (Tableau, Looker Studio, HubSpot, Zendesk, and others) via a URL and login, and displays them as a scheduled screenshot. Power BI gets its own native app instead, because it integrates directly with the Power BI API rather than just capturing a webpage; that's what enables the live refresh, slicers, and page-level control described below.

💡 Tip: To see your Power BI dashboard/report on screen, it needs to be added to a playlist that's published to a screen. If you haven't connected a screen yet, see our hardware collection for setup instructions for your device.


Requirements

  • Fugo plan: the Power BI app is a Premium app, available on the Core and Enterprise plans only. (See pricing plans.)

  • Power BI license: the Power BI account you authorize with needs a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. A free Power BI license can only view/share content within your own personal workspace - it can't authorize access to shared workspace content the way this integration needs. (Exception: if your organization has Premium or Fabric capacity of F64 or higher, viewers with free licenses can still access shared content without their own Pro/PPU license but the account doing the initial authorization in Fugo should still have Pro or PPU.)

  • Microsoft Entra ID access: the first time this is set up, an Entra admin may need to grant admin consent for the Fugo CMS application - see the Troubleshooting section below if this hasn't been done yet or you need guidance.


How to add the Power BI app to a playlist

Everything you display on a screen is published through a playlist. There are two ways to get the Power BI app into a playlist:

  • Add it directly as a full-screen slide - drop the Power BI app straight into your playlist's content list as its own full-screen instance. The fastest route if you just want the dashboard shown as-is.

  • Build it into a custom design first - if you want more control over the layout (like adding your logo, cropping the dashboard into a frame, pairing it with a ticker or other apps), build that layout in Studio, save it, then add that saved design into your playlist as a content item.

Either way, you'll end up configuring the same Power BI settings and publishing from the same playlist. The Design Studio is just an optional detour for a custom layout. We'll walk through both options below.

Option A: Add Power BI directly in the playlist builder

1. Log into your Fugo account. If you don't have one yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.

2. Open the Playlists page from the lefthand navigation panel. Then click Create Playlist.

3. This opens the playlist editor, which will walk you through four steps:

Content → Screens → Schedule → Preview.

You'll land on the Content step first:

4. Switch the source selector to Apps.

5. Either scroll or use the search bar to find the Power BI app and click its card.

If you plan to add more than one report/dashboard, then you can click the app as many times as needed to create multiple instances of the app.

6. You'll see that your app instance/s added to your content list on the right:

☝️ The Power BI app is a Premium app, available during your free trial and after upgrading on the Core & Enterprise plans only. If your plan doesn't support Premium apps, you'll see a lock icon and an upgrade prompt instead.

7. In your content list, find the Power BI item and click its gear icon to open its settings.

8. Sign into Power BI and configure the app as covered in Configuring your Power BI app settings below, then click Save.

9. Continue to Screens, Schedule, and Preview as covered in How to publish your playlist to a screen below.

Option B: Design a custom layout in the Studio, then add it in the playlist builder

1. Click Studio in the top navigation, then click Create or Get started to start a new design.

2. In the left-hand content menu, open the Apps tab.

3. Either scroll or use the search bar to find the Power BI app and click its card.

4. This will drop the app onto your canvas. Drag its resize handles to size and position it: full screen, or shrunk down to share the slide with other content.

5. With the app tile selected, click the purple cog icon in the contextual toolbar above it to open the Power BI app settings.

6. Sign into Power BI and configure the app as covered in Configuring your Power BI app settings below, then click Save when you're done.

7. Customize the rest of the canvas as you like. You can do things like:

  • Add your company logo.

  • 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.

👉 Learn more about Studio features in our Design Studio Overview.

8. To add another slide with another dashboard/report or page, add another slide and instance of the Power BI app.

9. Name your design when you're done with it and click Save. Then click Back to Fugo to exit out of the Design Studio.

10. Go to the Playlists page and create (or open) a playlist.

11. In the Content step, switch the source selector to Studio, and select the design you just saved - it'll be added to your content list on the right, just like any other item.

12. Continue the steps through Screens, Schedule, and Preview as covered in How to publish your content to a screen below.


Configuring the Power BI app settings

Whether you opened it from a playlist or from the Studio, the Power BI app settings work the same way:

Log in

Click Authorize to sign in with your Power BI account. A popup window will ask you to sign in. Once authorized, Fugo fetches your workspaces, reports, and dashboards.

Workspaces

Choose which Power BI workspace to pull from.

Type

Choose Dashboards or Reports.

Dashboards/Reports

Pick the specific dashboard or report you want to display.

If your report has multiple pages, use the Report Pages dropdown to select the page you want this slide to show.

Page Slicers

If your report/dashboard has slicers, toggle on the ones you want to filter by (e.g., specific years, categories, or regions). This lets you create tailored views of the same report for different screens or audiences.

Orientation

Choose which layout of the report to display (e.g., Master for the default desktop layout, or another view if your report has multiple layouts defined in Power BI).

Zoom level

Adjust the zoom percentage of the rendered report/dashboard to fit more or less detail on screen.

Scrolling

For long dashboards, turn this on and set a pixel height to control which portion of the dashboard Fugo displays (you may need to adjust by trial and error).

When Scrolling is enabled, you can also toggle on Animate to have Fugo smoothly animate the scroll through the dashboard, rather than jumping between sections.

Screenshot

Enable this if you want Fugo to render your dashboard in a virtual browser on a Cloud server and display an auto-updating screenshot instead of loading it live.

This is a useful option if your dashboard is too data-intensive to load quickly on your hardware, or if your screen/player's browser is too old to support Power BI (it needs one of the two most recent Chrome versions).

If you leave this setting off, Fugo will open & render your dashboard directly on your screen/player's browser.

If the Screenshot setting is on, Pause sets how many seconds Fugo waits before taking the screenshot, giving slow-loading dashboards time to render.

Interval sets how frequently Fugo updates the screenshots.

Duration

How long this slide displays before moving to the next slide, if it's part of a rotation.

Click Save once you're happy with your settings.


How to publish your playlist to a screen

Once your Power BI app (or a Studio design containing it) is in a playlist's content list:

1. In the Screens step, select one or more screens to publish to.

Use the By Screen tab to pick specific screens or screen groups individually, or switch to the By Property tab to target any screen that has a matching custom property instead - for example, publishing to every screen tagged Location: Chicago or Department: Sales, without selecting each one by name.

2. In the Schedule step (optional), choose how this content should run:

  • Always on - plays continuously once published.

  • One-off block - plays only within a specific start/end date range.

  • Recurring - repeats on chosen days of the week within chosen time windows.

3. Use Preview to check how it'll look on screen. All your playlist settings will be listed on the righthand panel for you to review.

4. Make sure to give your playlist a name, then click Save and Publish to push it live, or Save to keep it as a draft you can come back to.

👉 Learn more about playlists & scheduling settings in our Playlists Overview.

How often will my dashboard/report refresh on screen?

Once configured and published to screen(s), there's no manual intervention needed to set a refresh interval or update your dashboard. Fugo automatically fetches the latest data from Power BI each time your app comes up within the content rotation.


Troubleshooting the Power BI app

Grant Admin Consent for fugo.ai

If the app isn't working for you (i.e. you're seeing an internal server error), one thing you can do is grant admin consent for fugo.ai in the Microsoft Entra admin center.

  1. Navigate to the Microsoft Entra admin center and go to the Enterprise Applications page.

  2. Locate the application named "Fugo CMS" within the applications list.

  3. Access the Permissions tab for the Fugo CMS application.

  4. Click the prominent blue button to grant admin consent.

Enable your users' ability to request Admin Consent

  1. Inside the Microsoft Entra admin center, go to your Enterprise Applications page.

  2. Navigate to the Consent and permissions tab under Security.

  3. Click into the Admin consent settings tab.

  4. Look for an option to let you or your team send an email asking for admin consent.

  5. You'll get an email with a link - Entra admins just need to follow it to give the green light.

For more detailed info, check out Microsoft's article on permissions needing admin consent.

Permissions to enable Power BI slicers

You're able to adjust Power BI slicers directly in Fugo. However, you'll need direct access to the dataset used in the report.

If not already applied, the Power BI admin will need to follow these steps to add the relevant user permissions:

  1. Open OneLake.

  2. Locate and select the model associated with the report.

  3. Navigate to File > Permissions.

  4. Click Add User.


Need more help?

Get in touch via the support chat inside the CMS, or email support@fugo.ai.

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