13 power tips for Microsoft Power BI

If you have a data science team, you can also make models from Azure Machine Learning available in Power BI using Power Query.

8. Combine Power BI and Power Apps

You can use Power BI reports in solutions you build in Power Apps, embed Power Apps into Power BI reports, and set up Power Automate workflows from inside Power BI. So if there’s an action that makes sense to take after getting insights from data, such as adding a customer to an email marketing campaign or making a budget request, you can put the app or flow for doing that in the report where you get the insights — and the filters and selection you make in Power BI carry over to the app or workflow. For mobile users who are more likely to be working from a Power app, you can embed the Power BI report in the app instead.

9. Fit more data into executive dashboards

Different BI users need different levels of information in their visualizations. Managers and business analysts might want a lot of details, but if your executives are tracking 20 or 30 key metrics for multiple regions around the world, it’s better to present that at a glance with a simple view that shows the target and the actual figure rather than a more complex visualization. That way you can look up information quickly in a meeting without getting lost in too many charts and figures. Use a rotating tile or a Power KPI custom visualization to combine multiple report types on a single tile.

10. Use metrics to drive goals, scorecards, and OKR boards

Making a data-driven culture effective means using data to measure how well decisions are working out for the business. The new Metrics hub in Power BI Pro automatically tracks metrics that have been assigned to you, with templates for creating scorecards to track performance and progress on data sets you care about, including metrics based on existing Power BI reports that use categories or time-series data. You can also create manual metrics to update yourself.

If you follow a metric, Power BI will send you a Teams notification as the metric updates or you can subscribe by email. For the most important metrics, you can use Power Automate to trigger alerts or schedule meetings if poor progress means a metric is at risk or falling behind. The new Data Activator in Microsoft Fabric can also send alerts about specific reports and visualizations to Teams and Outlook or act as a trigger for Power Automate workflows.

11. Use information protection for sensitive data

When you’re putting confidential company data in Power BI, CIOs and CISOs can make sure only the right staff have access by applying the same Microsoft 365 and Azure Information Protection sensitivity labels as in Office, SharePoint, Syntex, and other tools. Those labels enable auditing through Microsoft Purview, enforce access in Power BI, and follow the data if it is exported to Excel or PowerPoint for end-to-end data leakage protection.

12. Collaboration for developers and data professionals

You can apply the same version control and application lifecycle management to both the data and code of data-driven applications using the git integration in Microsoft Fabric. Initial support for Azure DevOps — and soon, GitHub — for Power BI datasets and reports means developers and data scientists can share a CI/CD workflow for projects that rely on data models used for both reports and apps. With the new Semantic Link feature in Microsoft Fabric, you can use Python, R, and data notebooks to explore Power BI data — including the relationships and business logic in that data set — using data science tools.

13. Power BI is for IT data, too

Power BI isn’t just for business users; you can also use it to visualize data for IT monitoring tools. Power BI’s solution template for Azure Activity Logs uses an Azure SQL database and Stream Analytics to collect logs and display them using prebuilt Power BI Desktop reports, so you can look at trends in usage and problems. There’s also a set of prebuilt Power BI reports for the Intune Data Warehouse that shows device details such as configurations and compliance state, and a solution template for System Center Configuration Manager with a dashboard that covers client and server health, malware protection levels, software inventory, and which devices are missing updates. There are templates for a range of other tools, and you can build your own dashboards and reports for almost any tools, as long as you can get the data into a SQL Server or Azure SQL database.

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