There are numerous ways to publish a report to the PowerBI.com service, but the easiest way is by using the Power BI desktop. To do this, you'll need to simply click the Publish button in the desktop application, as shown in the following screenshot. If you have not previously signed in with your free PowerBI.com account, you will be prompted to create one or sign in with an existing account: 

You'll then be asked which workspace you want to deploy to. A workspace is an area in the Power BI service that is much like a folder, where you can bundle your reports, datasets, and dashboards. You can also assign security to the workspace and not have to worry about securing each item. Most importantly, it allows for team development of a Power BI solution, where you can have multiple authors on a solution. We'll cover much more about workspaces in the Sharing Your Dashboards section of this chapter.

At this point, select the My Workspace item, which will send the report and its data to your personal workspace. The report will then deploy to the Power BI service. The amount of time this takes will depend on how large your dataset is. You'll then be presented with two options: Open the Report or Get Quick Insights. 

Quick Insights is an amazing feature in Power BI that will try to find additional interesting insights about your data that you may not have known you had. For example, in the following screenshot of the sample report, it found that Disney dominated all other film studios in 2016. You'll notice that it not only provides a graphic of the anomaly in your data, but also a narrative to the right of the graphic. If you find any of the insights especially interesting, you can click the push pin on the top right of the graphic to save it into a dashboard. We'll cover dashboards in the next section of this chapter:

If you open the report, PowerBI.com will launch and show you the same report that you were viewing in the desktop in a web browser. You'll also be able to immediately see the report in the Power BI mobile app from your Android or iPhone. PowerBI.com has four key areas that you can interact with:

• DATASETS: This is the raw data that you have built in the Power BI desktop. You can also build a new dataset by clicking Get Data in the bottom-left corner of your browser. When you click the datasets, you can also build new reports from those dataset.
• WORKBOOKS: You can upload Excel workbooks into this area. These Excel workbooks can be used as a dataset or can form pieces of the workbook that can be pinned to a dashboard. 
• REPORTS: This refers to what you have built in the Power BI desktop. These reports can be explored, modified, or downloaded in this section. 
• DASHBOARDS: You can pin the best elements from multiple reports into a unified set of dashboards. These dashboards are the first thing most of your casual users will interact with: