Whether you love PowerPoint or whether you hate it,^[1] PowerPoint is one of the most commonly used communication tools in organizations around the world. If you want to reach an audience with information, odds are you’re going to use PowerPoint.

One of the key goals in building and sustaining a healthy data culture is to have more people working with more of the right data in more of the right ways as part of their day to day work, replacing tribal knowledge with data-driven insights and actions. To achieve this goal, you need to bring the right data to the places where people are already working – to meet them where they are today.

As often as not, people are working in PowerPoint today. This is a signal that emerged strongly from the customer conversations I’ve had since joining the Power BI CAT team – enterprise customers^[2] want the ability to seamlessly include Power BI reports and visuals in their PowerPoint presentations, to increase the reach and value of their investments in data and BI.

The Power BI team announced today that the “storytelling” integration between Power BI and PowerPoint is now generally available (GA) for Power BI customers everywhere, including customers using national clouds. The GA feature includes functional improvements based on feedback during preview, including the ability to embed individual visuals and to add “smart insights” generated from Power BI and added directly to the PowerPoint slide.

If your organization uses Power BI and PowerPoint, you should take a few minutes today to check out this important new release, and look for ways to incorporate it into your work.

^[1] Or like me, both love and hate it!

^[2] These are the customers I work with the most. I suspect there’s a similar signal waiting to be discovered from smaller organizations as well.