Power BI & Power Automate - How to automate reporting process

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Roland, and in this tutorial, we're diving into automation—something I’m incredibly passionate about, primarily because I value efficiency over tedious tasks. Today, we’re going to explore how Power Automate can help a Power BI professional like you save significant time, allowing you to focus more on analyzing data rather than managing it.

Introduction to Power Automate

So, what exactly is Power Automate? Formerly known as Microsoft Flow, Power Automate is an automation tool that allows users to create automated workflows through an intuitive graphical user interface. This means you don’t need any coding skills to build automated processes. Plus, it offers a variety of predefined templates to help you get started quickly. It’s also an integral part of the Microsoft PowerApps platform, making it highly compatible with Power BI.

With recent updates, Power Automate even functions as a visual element within Power BI reports.

Demo Scenario

For our demo, let’s assume we’re business analysts at a company's headquarters responsible for a daily sales report. Various branches send us their daily sales figures in a standardized Excel format that gets delivered at the end of the day. Our tasks include saving all these files to a network drive, refreshing the data in Power BI Desktop, publishing the updated report, and notifying the sales managers about the latest results.

Time-consuming, right? Well, let’s go through how we can automate this whole process with Power Automate.

Creating Automation Flows

We’re going to set up three different automation flows:

Save Attachments to OneDrive: This flow will automatically save email attachments in a specified OneDrive folder when the condition (email subject containing "daily sales") is met.
Notification in Microsoft Teams: This automation confirms in Microsoft Teams which files have been saved, ensuring that no data files are lost.
Power BI Dataset Refresh: The final automation will trigger a refresh for the Power BI dataset, followed by another notification to the team that the dataset has been successfully updated.

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Save Attachments to OneDrive

We start by opening Power Automate from the Power BI interface. Selecting the template for saving email attachments will allow us to set a condition where if the email subject contains "daily sales," it saves the attachment to our dedicated OneDrive folder.

After testing this, we can confirm that the attachment is saved correctly in OneDrive.

2. Files Saved Notification

Next, we need to create an automated flow from scratch that will notify us every time a new file is saved in OneDrive. We set up this automation to trigger whenever a file is added to the OneDrive folder. A message will be sent to Microsoft Teams to confirm the upload.

Organizing it this way ensures that you will receive notifications for every single file, thereby preventing missing any critical updates.

3. Power BI Dataset Refresh

Finally, we’ll configure a scheduled flow to refresh our Power BI dataset. Given that the reports are sent out by 5 PM, we can schedule the refresh for 6 PM the same day. We will also send a Teams notification to let users know the dataset has been updated for the next day’s report.

Conclusion

In this article, we demonstrated how you can automate the reporting process using Power Automate without needing any coding experience. The aim is to help you save time on monotonous tasks, allowing you to dedicate more time to analyzing data and identifying business-critical insights.

As always, I encourage you to explore the available connectors in Power Automate, as there are countless options to enhance your automation processes.

Thank you for tuning in! If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave them in the comments. Don’t forget to subscribe for more Power BI tutorials.

Keywords

Power BI, Power Automate, automation, reporting process, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, dataset refresh, data analysis, efficiency.

FAQ

What is Power Automate? Power Automate is an automation tool that allows users to create automated workflows through a graphical interface without needing programming knowledge.

How can I automate saving email attachments? You can use Power Automate to create a flow that automatically saves email attachments to OneDrive when specific conditions (like email subject) are met.

Can I notify my team about updates through Power Automate? Yes! You can set up a flow that sends notifications in Microsoft Teams whenever new files are uploaded or when the Power BI dataset is refreshed.

Do I need coding skills to use Power Automate? No, one of the benefits of Power Automate is that it allows users to build automated processes without any coding experience.

Can Power Automate integrate with non-Microsoft products? Yes, Power Automate allows integration with various applications, including non-Microsoft products like Google Drive and Gmail.