In recent years, several new updates to common data visualization software have been made. It is a competitive subsector of data analytics where big businesses compete to create enticing new features for their services.
By incorporating multiple services from the latest edition of Microsoft: Power Platform, we built an end-to-end solution to meet the needs of the customer.
We will show you in this article post how we can use Power Platform’s full potential to improve data visualization and reporting to a whole new stage. We will not share the original use case for confidentiality reasons, but we will instead walk you through an instance using publicly accessible COVID-19 data.
To view the new cases and total cases of COVID per country and per day we have created a collection of reports in Power BI-there is a global report. And then detailed reports for a few European nations. Via developing a data quality pipeline to identify and repair any missing values in the source system, in this case, an Excel in SharePoint, we have improved these reports. This data quality pipeline includes Power BI write-back features to directly fill in the missing values in the Power BI interface. Fixed values are automatically written back to the Excel source in SharePoint. All these are supported by the combination of the three key services offered by the Power Platform,More info go through Power BI Course.
1. Power Platform launch
The Power Platform is a suite of Office 365-integrated Microsoft business services ready to evaluate, build solutions, and automate business processes. It consists of three major services.
Power BI is a service for business analytics that analyzes and transforms data in a visually immersive way to produce reports. It can assist users in making educated decisions, recognizing patterns, or exchanging information with other users. Thanks to its numerous connectors, it can connect easily to various data sources.
Power Automate, formerly Microsoft Flow, is a method for automating routine processes and activities, saving us time and money by generating business flows. It is directly integrated with Power Apps, Power BI, Office 365, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics 365. There are hundreds of triggers that automatically start these processes and we can identify the various flow forms based on the trigger: automated, button (manual), scheduled, business (rules-based), or UI flows.
In a code-free development environment, Power Apps is a service for creating custom apps for business needs. It consists of a graphical interface where, thanks to the various connectors it provides, either Microsoft services or third parties, we can drag and drop components and customize the data source. These apps can be conveniently shared with individuals in our company and run on laptops, tablets, or phones. We can build three different types of apps: model-driven (data-built), canvas (fully customizable), or portal apps (responsive websites).
Other interesting features that are worth noting are given by Power Platform.
- Database
A cloud-scale database for storing and handling data used by business applications is the Common Data Service. It has complete integration with Power BI and Power Automate, so a variety of data and business logic can be organized easily.
- Power BI virtual agents
Power Virtual Agents is a platform for building bots that give our customers or suppliers customized interactions in order to quickly solve issues.
- Connectors
Connectors allow us to connect to a number of cloud apps, data, and devices. More than 275 connectors are available and the ability to make our own custom connectors is available. SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, OneDrive for Corporation, SharePoint, and so on are some of the most popular connectors.
An AI Builder is a solution for incorporating AI capabilities without writing code to our workflows and apps to boost business efficiency.
2. Write-back features incorporating services from the Power Platform
Power Platform’s strength lies in its ability to integrate its services to resolve interesting cases of business usage.
In our case, we want to verify the presence of missing data in our data source and directly alter these values in Power BI. Note that the reporting tools normally do not allow the source system to modify data because they are read-only. We are going to walk you through the whole process in this segment.
The workflow mentioned composed of the following steps.
- In Power BI, we generate reports with simple visualizations of results.
- We’re releasing Power BI Service studies. We build a dashboard there and configure alerts; every time there is a missing or rare value, an alert pops up.
- We inform the responsible person by sending a personalized email when an alarm is activated, thanks to Power Automate. There is also a Microsoft Teams message received.
Power BI report
The user is guided to a Power BI report that includes a Power Apps app where the incorrect data value can be corrected.
We need to conduct the following steps in each of the facilities, digging into a bit more detail in each segment.
We need to link to our data source, which is an Excel file in SharePoint, with the Get Data feature in Power BI Desktop and generate reports related to the data in COVID-19. Figure 6 shows the report provided for Italy, where we present the total number of reported cases and the new cases every day. We may observe that there is missing data for 25th May in the bottom right graph.
We build warnings in the Service to determine when a problem occurs. To do this, we create a dashboard showing the number of errors (missing data) for each country with tiles (card visualizations). Alerts are then placed on these tiles. If the tile’s value is above 0, an alert is fired (an email and a Microsoft Teams message are sent to the user as described below). The explanation for creating multiple tiles/alerts (instead of a single tile/alert) is that parametrization is not enabled by the creation of alerts in Power BI. In our case, we wanted to send alerts for each country to a different user, so we had to create a different tile for each country/user.
In Power BI Facility, handling warnings in card views (showing the number of errors)
In Power Automate, we use a trigger to send a comprehensive message to the subject matter expert when the alarm is shot, as it can be used with notifications to trigger an action. Each warning has an associated flow that performs two actions: sending an email and a Microsoft Team message as well.
There is a link in both the email and the Microsoft Teams message which redirects to a report like the one shown in the above Figure. This study includes a table showing our data source’s missing value rows (left) and a visual Power Apps table (right).
Power BI report to change missing data
In Power Apps, we build a canvas app from a Power BI report to enforce the write-back feature. The app collects and generates a gallery out of the Power BI report data at the same time, the app is linked to the same data source as the one feeding Power BI-we will use this to write the data.
The first screen displays the data that the study has captured: the date, the type of case, and the number of new cases. When one of the arrows is pressed, we are guided to the edit screen, which is a window for the corresponding data source entry, filtered by the gallery screen fields. We can change the data values for any day in every entry and save it. In the database, adjustments will appear instantly.
PowerApps software
We will verify that the integration of apps in Power BI is interactive if we go back to the report. So any time we select a row in the report table, the app gallery will be filtered and the selected entry will simply be displayed.
Conclusion
In this article, we have incorporated Power Apps and Power Automate into a Power BI report. This helps to provide write-back functionality directly from the Power BI interface into the source system. We have accomplished this by setting up Power BI notifications and using them to activate a Power Automate flow to warn the user whenever a value is missing. You can learn more about Power BI write integration through Power BI online training.
