Today we’re going to look at Power BI on the Apple Watch.
Now, why would you want to use Power BI on your Apple Watch? I have no idea. And we’re going to find out.
The premise is that with your smartwatch, you have a device with a screen and an internet connection on you at all times. From your laptop, you can work with Power BI reports and dashboards. From your phone, you can work with Power BI reports and dashboards.
And from your Apple Watch, you can also be on the go. You can look at your numbers. But is it really practical?
I am a little bit skeptical, but we’re going to find out. I’m going to talk you through the entire setup, what you need to do, what the limitations are, and what we actually can do.
Step 1: Create a Power BI Report with a KPI Card
Let’s start by creating a new Power BI report. We’ll pick a published semantic model—in this case, I’ll use the Internal Data Warehouse.
We’re only going to use this report to create a KPI card. So we’ll choose the KPI visual, put the date from the date dimension on our axis, and from the timesheet lines, let’s put in the hours.
We’re looking at the hours actual here in a KPI card. Now, this report is not really beautiful. It’s not designed to be done well, but it doesn’t really matter.
Why? Because with Power BI on your Apple Watch, you can only put one KPI card in there. So that’s about it.
Let’s save the report. We’ll call it something like “Apple Watch Report” in internal reporting. Hit save.
Step 2: Create a Dashboard (Yes, Really)
Now we’re going to create a dashboard.
And yes, I know what you’re thinking. “Bas, dashboards are out. Nobody’s using dashboards.”
I agree. I’m never using dashboards. I always hate it when you publish a Power BI report from Power BI Desktop and it automatically creates a dashboard as well. I always remove them before publishing.
But today, we are going to create a dashboard because a dashboard with a KPI tile on it is the thing that you can put on your Apple Watch.
Pinning the Visual to a Dashboard
From the Power BI report, we’re hovering over the visual (the KPI visual), and we’re going to click on the little pin icon. Click “Pin visual”.
It’s going to ask us what to do. If you have existing dashboards in your workspace (like a total maniac), then you can click “Existing dashboard” and add this visual to an existing dashboard.
If you don’t, like a sane person like me, then you can click “New dashboard”. We’re going to call this dashboard “Apple Watch Dashboard”.
Hit “Pin”. Now a new dashboard has been created with a visual on it.
Let’s go to the workspace and we can find that this Apple Watch dashboard has been created, and it looks about right.
This is basically all we need to do in the Power BI service on our laptop.
Step 3: Sync to Your iPhone
Let’s head over to my phone. The mobile app just refreshed, and indeed, the Apple Watch dashboard is there.
If we click on the Apple Watch dashboard, we can see there’s this little dashboard right here.
From here, we need to click “Sync” before it ends up on our Apple Watch. So we hit sync.
It is now synced to the Apple Watch.
Step 4: View on Your Apple Watch
Now watch what we can do. Put away the phone and reveal the Apple Watch.
We’re on the Apple Watch. We’re going to the apps, and we’re going to scroll through until we find the Power BI app.
Here we can see that now the hours actual with the number 16 is actually on our Apple Watch. This means we have this tile that is now live-updated on our watch at all times.
We can go into the Power BI app on the watch, and we find that the number 16 is there. When the tile updates—when the data is updated, the semantic model is refreshed, new rows are coming in and the number is now 20—then our watch will show 20 right here on this little screen.
You can click it and you can see what the visual looks like… kind of.
The Limitations (And They’re Big)
This is where you get into the limits of working with a really small screen.
The Apple Watch just doesn’t have the resolution nor the screen size to actually make sense of anything that’s being shown here.
That’s about it. This is what you can do with the Apple Watch and Power BI.
Is This Actually Useful?
So, is this something you want to do in practice?
Maybe there are some edge cases. I certainly know that I will not be using it.
If I’m looking at the company’s performance, I’ll be looking at probably my laptop screen. Maybe when I’m on the go, I’ll grab my iPhone and look at the Power BI app on my phone.
The Power BI app on my watch? It’s a nice gimmick. It’s cool to show demos. It’s nice for videos like this.
And to be fair, I strongly believe (I have no proof, but I strongly believe) that Microsoft created the Power BI Apple Watch app just for content creators like me to put their Apple Watches on their company accounts, basically.
So maybe that’s the gain we get out of it—that we can create content with the Apple Watch about Power BI, and that the Apple Watch is then a business write-off.
Maybe that’s the whole point from Microsoft. I’m not quite sure. I don’t really see the use case.
Your Turn
Now, if you use Power BI on your Apple Watch and you use it in practice, and you have a very good use case, then please let me know in the comments below.
I’m genuinely curious—is there a scenario where this actually makes sense? Or is it just a fun party trick?
Let me know what you think!