Power Automate for Power BI – Great Guide

Power Automate for Power BI

Power Automate technology is used in business process automation to make operations more efficient. Automation will carry out a task so that you don’t have to use a certain trigger or action. Business tasks may be automated to save time. It makes it simpler to repeat actions repeatedly, which enables tasks to be completed in a fraction of the time it would otherwise need a human. In fact, company executives think that automating operations might result in annual savings of roughly 360 hours. It has the ability to both speed up repetitive processes and lowers the likelihood of errors. As a result, you won’t have to spend as much time correcting issues.

In addition to the time and effort savings, using automated software services might reduce the financial burden of hiring large enterprises. Your firm may save time, become more productive, and operate much more effectively by using the service called Power Automate. Employees may work more effectively and boost corporate performance by automating repetitive operations that consume time throughout the day. In this article, we will discuss power automation and its implementation.

Power Bi Overview

Power BI is a suite of web-based business analytics applications that allows users to quickly and easily connect to data, visualize that data, and conduct an in-depth analysis of that data. It provides user-friendly dashboards that provide a wide range of real-time data sources. Furthermore, it offers dynamic, lifelike data visualizations and interactive reports.

With the help of Power BI, users may aggregate data from any and all available internet sources. This gives them a holistic view of key indicators that can be queried with simple questions. Power BI is used by a wide variety of people in the corporate world, including IT experts, analysts, and developers.

Power Automate Overview

To save time and effort on basic tasks, Microsoft Power Automate may be used to set up automated workflows between your preferred business software, enabling you to do things like automatically synchronizing files, being notified of important events, and collecting and analyzing data. 

Microsoft created this useful program. It’s an entirely web-based bot that leverages RPA to automate the user interface and artificial intelligence to interpret analog data (Robotic Process Automation). It already has the necessary integrations to make cloud-based app and database automation a reality.

Connecting to an external data source may be done through an API or one of Power Automate’s hundreds of accessible connectors. Power Automate may transfer corporate data across systems at predefined intervals and give reminders for completed tasks. This is beyond the scope of typical processes. Connectors make it easy to integrate features from third-party programs and services.

Steps to Integrate Power BI with Power Automate seamlessly

Your end users may launch an automated flow by clicking a button in your Power BI report when you include a Power Automate visual. The flow may also be data-contextual, which implies that the inputs to the flow may alter depending on the end-user-set filters.

Include a photo of Power Automate

  • The Power Automate symbol may be found in the Visualizations pane.
  • Additionally, Power BI Desktop’s ribbon allows you to add the graphic. Select Power Automate from the Power Platform section of the Insert tab (preview).
  • When you choose a visual, it will be added to the current report page along with use instructions.
  • Scrolling, adjusting the image’s size, or clicking the Focus mode symbol will allow you to view all the instructions.
  • Once you’ve read the instructions, you may alter the button’s size and position anywhere you choose on the report.

Alter the flow

  • Add any data fields to the Power Automate Data section that you want to utilize as dynamic inputs to the flow.
  • To configure the button, click More options (…) > Change.
  • You may either create a new flow and apply it to the button in the visual’s edit mode or choose an existing flow to apply to the button.
  • You have the option to either start from scratch or use one of the program’s included templates. Choose New > Instant cloud flow to start again from the beginning:
  • Decide what to do next.
  • Here, you have the option of selecting a subsequent action or specifying a control if you wish to make a more logical choice on the subsequent action.
  • The data field(s) might be referred to as dynamic content if you want the flow to be data-driven. In this example, an item is added to a SharePoint list using the Region data column. The region may have more than one value or just one value, depending on the end user’s selection.
  • You may give the flow a name and click Save after the flow logic has been configured.
  • To see the Details page for the just created flow, click the arrow button:
  • Click the Apply button to connect your flow to your button (the tick).

Test how flow develops

Before sharing a flow that you’ve added to a button with others, you should test it first. The only place this Power BI flows may be utilized is in a Power BI report. These flows cannot be utilized anywhere else, even in a Power Automate web app.

  • You should examine how the filter selections in the report impact the flow’s output if your flow is dependent on the context of the data.
  • Select Back to report, then simultaneously hit Ctrl and the button to test the flow while modifying the report.
  • The button’s wording indicates that the flow has started.
  • Click on Details in the flow that was initiated under the More commands option to check whether the flow was successful.
  • You can see the flow’s status and the number of runs it has received on the Details page:

Obtaining a license:

Utilize the Power Automate tool to link Power BI to the applications and services that you use the most. You may create automated processes using Power Automate to carry out a wide range of tasks, including receiving notifications, synchronizing files, gathering data, and more. For all these facilities, you need to have a license.

Each license for Power Apps, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 comes with a certain amount of Power Automate features. If you do not already have a license that gives you access to certain Power Automate functions, you will need to buy standalone licenses. If you wish to use all of the Power Automate connections that are available for Power BI’s capability, you must save your report in a workspace with a premium capacity.

If your report is not in a Premium capacity, you will have problems like the ones listed below (I had the same problems with both the Pro and Premium per-user plans, proving that it must be a Premium dedicated plan):

When you use the actions to Refresh a dataset and Refresh a dataflow, you can only arrange a flow to run a maximum of eight times per day. The flow will only run eight times in total before giving you an error and ceasing to work if you try to refresh your dataset or dataflow more than eight times in a single day.

If the report isn’t stored in a premium capacity, flows using the actions Export to file for Power BI reports and Export to file for paginated reports won’t work. The action Export to file for other sorts of reports is likewise applicable to flows.

Conclusion

Power Automate is a highly practical tool that integrates nicely with a variety of other tools, including Power BI, and can automate a broad variety of processes. Power Automate may be used to create automated processes that perform a variety of different things, such as gathering data, syncing files, issuing warnings, and more. Users may create these workflows from start, choose a template from a library, or modify an existing template.

FAQ

How many different flows can I create with Power Automate?

You are permitted to create an infinite number of flows, depending on the kind of license you have.

Can anything be automated using Power Automate?

You may automate a variety of computer operations, from crunching figures in Excel to monitoring social media, with the ability to connect to around 300 different data sources and any publicly accessible application programming interface (API).

Is Power Automate in real-time?

Although Power Automate Flows are background operations that do not occur simultaneously, they might share certain real-time workflow characteristics (without the real-time part).

What number of emails can you send with Power Automate?

By default, emails may only be sent to a maximum of 500 recipients per message. You will need to either increase the limit (up to 1000) or divide the email into numerous emails if you wish to send it to additional recipients.

Does Power Automate store data?

Users of the workflow application Power Automate may connect to multiple data sources and automate a variety of tasks. However, unless you are doing calculations within your flow, it won’t preserve your data. If so, you might use variables rather than the flow itself to hold the data.

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