Ad-hoc Power Bi reporting in Dynamics 365 (preview)

In this article I am going to discuss yet another preview feature! I have to say I am super excited about this one because this feature allows users to pull up an ad-hoc Power BI report, without having to actually build a power bi report! HUH? I know that sounds strange right? How can you visualize data in Power Bi without building a report? We are all familiar with showing Power Bi reports in Dynamics 365, but we had to build the report first in Power Bi. After that, we could add the Power Bi dashboard to Dynamics 365, embedding the previously created Power Bi report inside of Dynamics 365. So yes, this is very different.

When you enable this preview feature, you’ll notice a new button on the command bar when you visit a view in Dynamics 365. The button is called ‘Visualize this view’, and when you click the button Power Bi will automatically generate several charts inside a Power Bi dashboard based on the view that you’re on!

How long it takes to generate the report depends on the amount of data in the selected view. The more rows there are in the view, the more data Power Bi has to process and therefor the longer it takes for the report to be generated. When you click the ‘Visualize this view’ button the report will show as an overlay on top of the view. Power Bi will automatically select certain columns from the view. These fields will be visible on the right hand side of the report, in the ‘Your Data’ pane. If you want to change the rows the visualizations are based on, you can do that easily by unchecking the unwanted columns and checking the boxed next to the columns you want to be used in the report. When you check and uncheck columns, the report will refresh and show the new charts.
If you hover your mouse over any of the charts, you’ll notice an ellipse and a pencil icon. When you click the ellipse you’ll see the a fly out menu with the following buttons: Export data, Show as a table (this will remove the charts and only show all data in a single table), Spotlight, and Get Insights. You can also sort the chart by selecting the sort axis. When hovering on the pencil icon you’ll see the text ‘Personalize this visual’. When the button is clicked you’ll see a menu from where you can make changes to the chart. From here you can change the chart type, you can select a different axis, add a column as the legend, select the values column, etc.

I ran this report on a list of opportunities in my Dynamics 365 Sales instance and I noticed that besides charts, it also shows some KPI’s on the top of the report. When you select other columns in the report, these KPI’s will also change, now showing data using the newly selected columns.
When the ‘Show data table’ is clicked you’ll notice a grid view with the underlying records the charts are based on. I noticed the columns in the view are not exactly the same as the columns in the view in Dynamics, I’m actually getting more columns in the Power Bi view, so no problem here! When you hover your mouse over the data table in the Power Bi report you should see an ellipse on the top right side of the table. When you click on it you see the a fly out menu with the following buttons: Export data, Show as a table (this will remove the charts and only show all data in a single table), Spotlight, and Get Insights. Lastly you have the ability to sort the table by selecting any column.
The filter pane shows on the right hand side of the screen, on the left side of the data columns. When the data table is shown and you click on any of the columns in the table, you have the ability to select filters based on columns of the data table. Is there an option to save or share this Power Bi report? Unfortunately, no. This is not an option today. These are really ad-hoc reports that you can use to quickly analyze data. Keep in mind that this report is temporary, which means it will time out after one hour, after which you’ll need to close and reload the report.

Enabling the preview

You can enable this preview feature from the new Power Apps designer. I wrote an article about the new Power Apps designer which you can read here. Go to https://make.powerapps.com/ (make sure you have the right environment selected), then click on ‘Apps’ on the sitemap (left side of the screen). Click the ellipse next to the app for which you want to enable this preview. Hover your move over ‘Edit’ then click on the arrow and click on ‘Edit in preview’ to access the Power Apps designer. Once the designer loads, you’ll have to click on settings, which is shown on the command bar on the top of the designer. When you click on ‘Features’ in the settings window, you’ll notice the button to enable the feature. Keep in mind that in order for this functionality to work, you also need to have TDS endpoint enabled in your environment. You can check this setting by navigating to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com, selecting the environment and navigating to Settings > Features. This enables the application to connect to Power BI using Tabular Data Stream(TDS) Protocol. If this setting is disabled you’ll experience issues.

I hope you found this article informative! In order to see a demonstration of the functionality check out the video below! Make sure to check in next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!