The desire to have a big screen in an open plan office showing a revolving set of Power BI dashboards has been a request that we have encountered from some customers. A quick search shows that lots of providers do these kinds of displays, but the price can be pretty steep and the offerings a bit over the top for what is a fairly simple requirement.
We came across the idea of a tab browser for Chrome or Edge. This extension add-in allows you to open up some tabs displaying whatever pages you want and rotate between them at different speeds. I chose one called “Revolver – Tabs” but there are lots of others.
Revolver – Tabs – Chrome Web Store (google.com)
This has plenty of options to specify the number of seconds between switching tabs and even has options to reload the page to get fresh data.
Neaten up your Power BI reports
When you look at a Power BI report it has lots of clutter around the screen. Menus, options and toolbars that will look ugly on your giant TV. However, if you add ?chromeless=1 to the end of the Power BI URL, all of that gets cleaned up. Your browser and desktop also have tabs and taskbars that you don’t want, so switch to full screen by pressing F11.
So the steps are:
- Install the browser extension.
- Open up your selected reports/pages in separate browser tabs.
- Neaten them up by adding the ?chromeless=1 extension.
- Change the extension settings to configure times between switching/page reloads.
- Start the tab switching extension running.
- Press F11 to go full screen.
One last thought, these are just browser pages, so if you wanted to intersperse with images or messages, you can easily create a page in Word or PowerPoint and save it as a self-contained web page (.mht or .mhtml format). Just open that in one of your browser tabs and it will be included in your carousel.
– Stuart Brown, 13 April 2021
