Can Power Apps be used to build a tool that allow for budgeting and forecasting? Along the lines of Data Entry via form? and how can you go about this
The goal is to allow a user to write back a Budget / Forecast value to a sql server table.
Month Budget Forecast
Jan20
Feb20
Mar20
Apr20
.. etc
In addition, it will need to be designed to allow users to enter both budget and forecast via inventory level such as by Panel Class, by Format etc.
Either way, MonthYear or Inventory levels, the total values need to roll up to be the same. Similar to cubes on Board reporting tool.
Any tips?
In short, yes you can create form to submit data to the database and then analyze and display data in PowerBI. PowerApp and PowerBI can work together in many scenarios. Here you may have a quick idea of the possibilities..
https://www.predicagroup.com/blog/powerapps-and-power-bi/
Related
I am trying to understand the best way of creating a monthly report which will be looking for the previous month's data and allow approvers to enter their comments and approve each slicer (location) in the filter section. I have PowerBI reports which already set and have the data I need. What would be the best approach to take allowing users (there is a user permission list in excel which look for each user's location and approval location) to enter their comments and approve each location? I was thinking of using the PowerBI report as my source and running power automate flows for running approvals in power apps. Any suggestions?
Power BI noob here, still thinking like a SQL coder, so please be patient.
How can I use the user name of the person running the report to filter the report?
As a convenience for my users, I want to provide a way for them to automatically filter to only see data related to their office or region. I have a Person table that includes details like their office location. If I can filter that based on the user name of the person running the report, and join it to the rest of the data, that would work.
Unfortunately, I don't see a way to get the user name in M.
Using the USERNAME() function in DAX, I don't see a way to compare this with individual values in a column. I get an error about being unable to compare a measure to multiple values.
It seems this would be a common request, so I'm sure somebody has solved this problem. But I haven't yet found the solution.
Use a RLS in your model. You can use function USERNAME(),USEROBJECTID (), USERPRINCIPALNAME (); The last one is useful if you have table with users and their email.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-admin-rls
check also this GuyInCube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxU_FYSSnYU
First, be aware of the differences between USERNAME() and USERPRINCIPALNAME(). Most likely you will want to use the later one.
You can't use neither of these in M. Imagine your model is importing the data. The M code is executed once in the context of one user, then each other user accessing the published report will reuse the already loaded and calculated model. And of course, these are DAX functions, not M.
So in DAX you can use these to compare their values to columns from your model. You didn't gave any information about your model, but lets say there is a table Sales with columns Customer and Amount:
Customer
Amount
Bill Gates#Microsoft.local
100
Steve Ballmer#Microsoft.local
110
In this case, you can write a measure like this:
My Sales = CALCULATE(SUM('Sales'[Amount]), 'Sales'[Client] = USERPRINCIPALNAME())
When Bill Gates opens the report, he will see sales amount of 100, while if Steve Ballmer opens it he will see 110.
For diagnostic purpose, you can make a measure like this and show it somewhere in your report:
Who am I = USERPRINCIPALNAME()
If your goal is to build dynamic Row-Level Security within Power BI, it has some functionality which might help you, so take a look at these articles:
Row-level security (RLS) with Power BI
Restrict data access with row-level security (RLS) for Power BI Desktop
Row-level security (RLS) guidance in Power BI Desktop
Dynamic Row Level Security with Profiles and Users in Power BI : Many-to-Many Relationship
I am working on the reporting project that uses PowerBI as the data visualization tool.
I need create a processing approval workflow on the PowerBI tool. After seeing the Dashboard, the employer can approve some exception cases and the workflow can direct connect with email or ticket system.
There are 2 cases:
Approve for the whole dashboard that supports to be easy. I don't have any problem here.
Approve for singular object/row in a table chart. So I must generate number of buttons according to the number of row, which I need help. I don't know how to generate dynamic number of buttons and attached to row. And how to program/code it to create a view or action to become an approval step.
Button PowerBI
In this screenshot, my plan is create buttons in each row and each button has the same function with parameter is username or IP. And after that I can send email to the user and notice him/her that his/her case is approve for exception.
I find this https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/A-simple-and-fun-guide-to-Microsoft-Flow-and-Power-BI/ba-p/151530. But it doesn't seem helpful. Anyone here has ever dealt with approval case like this.
Is PowerBI able to do the approval process like I want?
Thank you so much.
First: This kind of goes against the spirit of BI in general. BI is for data visualization, exploration, etc. It's not really a UI for inserting data and executing tasks. Maybe you want instead to have a front end that lets you do things, and only needs to handle a very limited dataset? PowerApps is good for that. If the dataset is less than 1000 rows, this could work.
Second: I'm pretty sure it's not possible to create a button (like one that you'd see in an HTML page) that does what you want it to do in a Power BI table visual.
Third: There is a "drill through" button capability, but this just lets you navigate from one area in the report to another, not send an email or execute a Power Automate flow or anything like that. You may have seen a button on a table visual, but it's misleading. It's not really programmable like an HTML/JS button on a website.
https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/create-a-drill-through-button-in-power-bi/
That said, within the last 1.5 years or so, we now have the PowerApps add-in available. You could create an app that utilizes your streaming dataset, create a gallery that looks at that dataset and creates a kind of table with buttons on it, and then each button is set to execute the flow you've created in Power Automate.
PowerApp Add in chiclet
All of this is very, extremely straightforward, but beware, the PowerApp will start to cost you extra money depending on where your data is housed. If it's a SQL server, you'll need both a premium PowerApp license and Power Automate license too.
Sorry for the not so great news, but this is kind of a limitation of Power BI.
I am working on a PowerBi project and I need some advice/questions on the best way to approach this project. I am tasked to create a dashboard for employee metrics pulled from an onsite SQL Server database. The managers here are going to have access to the PowerBi cloud, so I will end up uploading this to the cloud. There are 10 or so metrics that need to be shown on the dashboard. We have 5000+ employees. My first thought was to create a table and dump all the metrics into a table and set the PowerBi report to import the data, but that seems excessive and a waste of space to upload all that data to the CLOUD because all of the managers don't need access to every employee. They may want to see 1 or 2 employees' metrics on the dashboard.
My second thought is to (and if this is possible) create a stored procedure that will take the employee id and output a dataset for PowerBi to create a visual for. On the dashboard, have a list of employees and when a manager selects one, PowerBi will call the stored procedure with the employee id and the dataset will be returned for PowerBi to decipher into a visual based on my measurements. I guess I would set the PowerBi report connection type as DIRECT QUERY?
Here are my questions:
Is this possible? Is it possible to what I am thinking for my second plan? Is this how DIRECT QUERY works?
If so, how does DIRECT QUERY work with the PowerBi cloud?
What is setup like? Do I just install the PowerBi Data Gateway/configure it like IMPORT DATA and PowerBi does the rest?
A couple of queries:
What is the frequency of data update ?
In case if it is a batch job, it is ideally preferable to import that data from source into powerbi model and do reporting on the imported data as
a) The performance would be quicker
b) There would be no to and for of data across on prem database and cloud
c) the source would not be impacted constantly
So is the ask to have RLS wherein the managers should see only the employees under them?
Then it is pretty easy to implement RLS in imported version rather than in case of direct query.
Also you won't be able to pass parameters to stored procedures, and you can't execute them in direct query mode. You can however, create table valued functions which give you the ability to use table variables and perform other functions that are more complex in nature in Direct Query mode
you can refer this for additional details :
https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Can-i-call-Stored-Procedure-with-Direct-Query/m-p/267141#:~:text=%40Pallavi%20you%20won't%20be,nature%20in%20Direct%20Query%20mode.
Connection Type: Direct Query to multiple sources so limited DAX available especially in Power Query load.
Data Model Query: The Data model is not a perfect star schema but there is an attempt to separate tables into business processes and lookup tables. There are probably a few issues to discuss the current data model. I only have 1 question at this time.
My current goal is to generate a single summarised customer table to replace the current two tables that have some measure I need like the number of app customers, a number of total customers, date customer first accessed app etc.
So I cannot merge the 2 customer tables and add calculated columns and measures at the import stage as power bi does not support or allow it and sql is out as I am using direct query. My plan is to create a summarised customer table using DAX summarise function on front end visual page, that has only the app customers and then measures like the total number of customers etc. Is this best practice or is there a better way of approaching this? Understand you would ideally do in sql, or power query but in these circumstances, I think this is the best way but wanted a second view.
Is there a reason to use Direct Query over Import? If you are in Import mode, you can easily Append the two client tables together in PowerQuery.
Treb Gatte, Power BI MVP