My Current Power BI Project
This is SERIOUSLY DISAPPOINTING. I’ve been working with Power BI for a couple of weeks now, maybe a month or so, with the hope of automating the data visualization of marketing and operations. The dream was to have Power BI Service (the app in the cloud, not the one on my desktop), pull in data from Quickbase via use of API, on a regularly scheduled basis. That data runs through the visuals and updates the results and then, have those visuals be saved on Sharepoint as PDFs for our clients. For the marketing side of things, I was asked to create PDFs but on the operations side of things, I’m thinking of trying to go for web/magazine experience that can be translated to PDFs or PowerPoints to be downloaded and sent to our clients.
I’m having problems with the output side of things. I can get the communication between Quickbase and Power BI to work so the visuals update daily now. But I can’t get an automated output. It’s one thing to download a single report, it’s another to download at minimum 60 reports and we are slated to grow to double that. Downloading these reports seem to take around 1 to 2 minutes. So spending between 1 to 2 hours downloading these reports every week seems to be a poor use of time. That’s why I need automation.
I’ve looked at using VBA (of course!) but apparently Power BI isn’t built in an “object” fashion that would allow VBA to do anything with Power BI.
I’ve looked at Microsoft Flow which is some kind of workflow automation but currently, the flows just add rows to Power BI datasets. I couldn’t find anything that would kick off PDFs and save into Sharepoint or Dropbox or wherever. I don’t know enough about Flow to create a whole new category but that could be an option… but further down the road.
I see hints of something called Mobile Apps or PowerApp which I do want to look into…but much further down the road. I don’t think it’ll help solve my current problem.
There is a schedule feature in Power BI for updating the datasets but no schedule feature for exporting the results.
There is a subscription feature where one can subscribe to a report but you have to have Power BI Pro and I don’t think our clients will have the Pro version, maybe not even any version of Power BI. Also, when you subscribe, you only subscribe to a page, not the whole report. I tried pinning the whole report onto a dashboard and then subscribe to the dashboard but the whole report got scrunched into a single PNG. Not user friendly.
Then I ventured into dashboard alerts but they work only with gauges, KPIs and cards (types of visuals in Power BI), whereas our report is mostly bar graphs or matrix tables.
It appears that the only option left is to use the Power BI Report Builder which was just built in April 2019 and probably more fully published in June. The capability to export reports to PDF was not announced until February 2019, so this whole output section is not fully fleshed. The Report Builder looks like a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) with its own set of lingo. The Microsoft lead on this Power BI project says this Report Builder will enable us to automate the exporting the report to PDFs when we have to deliver many reports.
So, I got a book this weekend on SSRS to learn a whole new lingo.
Like I said before, I can’t learn fast enough.
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