Power Bi

Power BI — Integration Setup

Show a Power BI report or dashboard on your Q-Play screens by connecting with a Microsoft account. The account you sign in with must have a Power BI Pro or PPU licence and access to the content you want to display. No Power BI Premium or Fabric capacity is required on the infrastructure side.

If the connected account's password is reset or MFA requirements change, the integration will stop working and will need to be re-authorised. See the Re-authorising the integration section at the bottom of this guide.

We recommend creating a dedicated Microsoft account for Q-Play rather than using a personal or shared employee account. If the signed-in account is ever deleted from your organisation, the integration will stop working. A dedicated account ensures continuity regardless of staff changes.

Before you begin, have your Workspace ID and Report ID (or Dashboard ID) ready. You will need to enter them immediately after signing in with Microsoft, so gathering them in advance will save you time.

For a general introduction to how integrations work in Q-Play — including how to find the Integrations section, add a new integration, and manage versions — see Working with Integrations in Q-Play.

Step 1 — Add the integration and sign in

Find Power BI in the integrations list, give it a name, and work through the setup steps.

On the Settings step, set your preferred Timezone and Language.

On the Credentials step, you can optionally click Sign in with Microsoft straight away — or skip this for now and sign in later once you have your job configured and are ready to run it immediately after. If you do sign in here, you will be redirected to Microsoft's login page, and then back to Q-Play automatically once authorised. Either way, the integration is created when you click Create Integration.

Once you are back in Q-Play, you have 10 minutes to configure and run the screenshot job (step 2 below). This is a Microsoft limitation — the authorisation code Q-Play receives from Microsoft is only valid for 10 minutes. Running a job within that window exchanges the short-lived code for a long-lived token that Q-Play can use going forward. If you miss the window, simply open the integration's Settings and click Sign in with Microsoft again to get a new 10-minute window.

Step 2 — Add and run the screenshot job

On the integration page, click + Add Job. A panel slides in from the right.

Fill in the job settings:

Job Name — a name for this job, e.g. Screenshot.
Job Type — leave this as Screenshot.

Under Content:

Content type — choose Report or Dashboard depending on what you want to display.
Workspace ID — enter the Workspace ID from Power BI.
Report ID / Dashboard ID — enter the ID of the report or dashboard you want to show.

Your IDs are found in the URL when you open the content in Power BI. Here is an example of a Power BI report URL:

https://app.powerbi.com/groups/89b63c7c-e8ab-4322-b1e6-cabb581c1d94/reports/90983b81-7237-4b0d-902c-5b8c196c205e/93a0bdd07004584f8f3b?experience=power-bi

Broken down:

Workspace ID: 89b63c7c-e8ab-4322-b1e6-cabb581c1d94 — the ID directly after /groups/.
Report ID or Dashboard ID: 90983b81-7237-4b0d-902c-5b8c196c205e — depending on your content type, this is the ID directly after /reports/ (for reports) or /dashboards/ (for dashboards). This is only the first ID segment.
Page ID: 93a0bdd07004584f8f3b — the ID directly after the Report ID, before ?experience=.... This is a separate value from the Report ID.

For dashboards the process is the same, except the URL contains /dashboards/ instead of /reports/. Dashboards do not have pages, so there is no Page ID to worry about.

If you are setting up a screenshot job, you will also need the Page ID — this tells Q-Play which specific page of the report to capture. This only applies to report screenshot jobs, not dashboards.

Report page name — (reports only, optional) if your report has multiple pages, enter the name of the specific page you want to display. Leave blank to show the report's default page.
Dashboard fit — (dashboards only) choose how the dashboard is fitted to the screen: Fit to width, Actual size, or One column. Power BI dashboards are not dynamic, so this controls how they are scaled.
Image width / Image height — the resolution of the screenshot. Defaults to 1920×1080, which suits most screens.

Under Scheduling:

Schedule type — leave as Scheduled.
Refresh schedule — choose how often Q-Play re-renders and updates the screenshot. Defaults to every 30 minutes. Sub-30-minute intervals are available on paid tiers.

Click Save Integration, then click Run now in the top right. This first manual run is required to authorise the connection. After a successful run, the job will continue automatically on the schedule you set.

Showing multiple reports or dashboards

A single integration instance can show both reports and dashboards — simply add a separate job for each piece of content you want to display, and set the Content type accordingly on each job.

Row-Level Security

Row-Level Security (RLS) applies automatically based on the signed-in account. Every screen using this integration displays data exactly as that account sees it in Power BI.

Re-authorising the integration

If the integration stops working after a password reset or an MFA change, you need to re-authorise it. Open the integration's Settings panel (the gear icon in the top right of the integration page) and click Sign in with Microsoft under Credentials.

When you sign in with Microsoft, Q-Play stores a refresh token — not your password. Think of it like a keycard: you prove your identity once at the front desk, and the keycard keeps working on its own so you don't have to check in every time. But Microsoft can invalidate that keycard whenever the account's security state changes.

There are two situations where this happens:

Password reset: the refresh token was issued against the old password. When a password changes, Microsoft invalidates all tokens issued before that point — this is deliberate security behaviour to ensure that stolen tokens also die when a password is reset. Q-Play's token is caught in this, so re-authorisation is required.

MFA or Conditional Access change: if your organisation newly requires MFA or stricter authentication for this account or app, the existing token was granted before that rule existed and no longer satisfies policy. Microsoft forces a fresh interactive sign-in to meet the new requirement.

This is not Q-Play dropping the connection — it is Microsoft intentionally revoking the token when the account's security state changes. Day-to-day token renewals are handled silently in the background and do not require any action.

This is another reason we recommend using a dedicated service account for Q-Play — a stable account with a fixed password and MFA already satisfied means none of these triggers ever fire, and the one-time authorisation effectively lasts indefinitely.

Once your integration is set up, the next step is to configure the Power BI app in Q-Play. Click here to learn how to set up the Power BI app.