The Dataverse and the Power BI Project Report Template

Quick reference

• 00:04 So now that we know what Power BI is and why it can be useful,
• 00:08 how do we go about getting access to power BI?
• 00:11 Well, the first really important thing to know is that Power BI needs to be
• 00:15 paid for.
• 00:16 It is a subscription product.
• 00:18 It is worth noting that it's a free version, and you can see here,
• 00:22 I'm the Power BI section of the Microsoft website.
• 00:26 And right top in the corner, we have Try free option just here.
• 00:30 So it's definitely worth giving this a try for
• 00:32 free to see if it's going to be helpful to you.
• 00:35 And then if it is and you think you're going to use this often,
• 00:39 you can sign up for a subscription.
• 00:41 And if we quickly jump into pricings so you can see what you'll be paying if you
• 00:46 just want a simple Power BI Pro subscription for an individual, yourself,
• 00:51 you're going to be paying roughly 999 a month.
• 00:54 All of these prices are currently in dollars and of course,
• 00:56 might be different depending on where you're located in the world.
• 00:59 Once you do sign up for a Power BI subscription,
• 01:03 you can then access it through your Microsoft 365 Portal.
• 01:07 So if we click on the app launcher in the top left-hand corner,
• 01:11 I do have Power BI installed and you can see it sitting just here.
• 01:15 So let's open up and take a look at an existing report.
• 01:19 Now, this is the Power BI homepage.
• 01:22 Before we dive into this, let's just open up a report that I've created
• 01:26 previously so we can see the kind of visualizations that we can create.
• 01:31 So I'm going to open up this Orders report, and
• 01:34 this was a report that I created a long time ago.
• 01:37 This isn't related to any of our project plan data.
• 01:40 This is really just to show you or
• 01:42 give you an example of what a report has the potential to look like.
• 01:46 You can see we have quite a lot going on in here.
• 01:49 Notice that I have different pages.
• 01:51 So currently, I'm showing some order information for
• 01:55 2017, but I have a page for 2018, 2019, and also 2020.
• 02:00 And then I have a page for all which basically consolidates
• 02:05 all of that information onto one main homepage.
• 02:09 And check out what we have here, we have various different things going on.
• 02:12 We have some summary statistics at the top, we call these cards in Power BI.
• 02:17 I have a line chart, I have a tree map, and
• 02:20 I have other different types of charts in here.
• 02:23 If I click the Edit button, it's going to allow me to go in and
• 02:27 start making changes to these visualizations.
• 02:30 And that's exactly what we call these charts and graphs visualizations.
• 02:34 On the right-hand side, we have a visualizations pane.
• 02:37 This is where we can choose the type of chart that we want to add to our report.
• 02:42 And if I click on one of these charts, let's go for this line chart just here,
• 02:46 it's going to load up in this visualizations pane the fields that I'm
• 02:50 using.
• 02:51 So this is a little bit similar to pivot tables in Excel.
• 02:54 We have a fields area which shows the different tables
• 02:57 that contain the fields that are currently in use.
• 03:00 So for example, I can see here because I have yellow circles and
• 03:04 ticks next to these.
• 03:06 The data that's being used in this particular chart that I have selected is
• 03:11 coming from the KPI measures table and the dates table.
• 03:14 If I click to expand, I can see that I'm using the female customers field and
• 03:19 the male customers field.
• 03:20 If I expand dates, I'm using the year field.
• 03:24 And you can see that these fields are in use for the x-axis and the y-axes.
• 03:29 And the idea here is that you basically take fields from different tables and
• 03:34 drag and drop them into these different areas to build up these visualizations.
• 03:38 Now, currently, we're working in the online version of Power BI.
• 03:42 But it's also worth noting that if you have got a subscription, then you can
• 03:46 download the desktop version of Power BI, which in general is what I prefer to do.
• 03:51 So from this interface, if you click on the three dots,
• 03:54 there's a download area and you can download the Power BI Desktop.
• 03:58 So as you can see, we can create some pretty fancy and complex reports.
• 04:03 And this is exactly what we're going to be doing with our Project for the Web data.
• 04:08 And to make our lives a whole lot simpler, I have a really good trick for you.
• 04:14 If you want to quickly be able to create a report that looks something like this,
• 04:20 then we can use a Power BI template and attach it to our Project for
• 04:24 the Web data from the database.
• 04:26 And using this template, it means that a lot of the graphs and
• 04:30 charts are going to be created for us.
• 04:32 We can then go in and make smaller modifications if we need to, but
• 04:36 the main bulk of the work is done.
• 04:38 So anytime there is a shortcut to produce something great, I'm going to take it.
• 04:43 So let's take a look at where that Power BI template lives,
• 04:47 because I think you're really going to like this.
• 04:50 Now, finding these free Power BI reporting templates isn't an easy task.
• 04:53 It's not very obvious where these are located.
• 04:55 So what we need to do is open up a web browser, and we're going to search the web
• 05:00 for this phrase just here, use Power BI Desktop to connect to your project data.
• 05:06 Let's run that search.
• 05:07 And the link that we're looking for here is the one on the Microsoft support site.
• 05:12 So let's jump onto Microsoft.
• 05:15 And there's a little bit of information here about these templates,
• 05:18 so it's always worth having a quick read through.
• 05:21 Now, if we scroll down, this is what we're looking for,
• 05:24 step number 3, Project Power BI Templates.
• 05:27 Everything before that is basically setting up Power BI Desktop.
• 05:32 Hopefully, by this stage, we already have access to that.
• 05:35 So we're going to click on the Power BI Templates link,
• 05:39 which takes us to a GitHub site.
• 05:41 And from here, we want to go into Project for the Web.
• 05:44 And this is what we're looking for Microsoft Project for
• 05:47 the web Power BI Template, let's click on the link.
• 05:51 And finally, we get to a Download button, so let's download the template.
• 05:54 Once again, this is going to go into wherever you have your downloads setting.
• 06:00 For me, it is the downloads folder.
• 06:03 Once we have it, we can click on Open the file.
• 06:05 It's going to launch Power BI, and
• 06:08 now we need to connect to the data that we want to use in this report.
• 06:13 So I'm going to import my Project for the Web data.
• 06:16 And you can see here immediately, it's asking us for our Dataverse URL.
• 06:21 Remember, the Dataverse is where all of our data is stored,
• 06:25 and this Dataverse URL is going to be different for everybody.
• 06:28 So where do we get our Dataverse URL from?
• 06:31 Well, again, this is something that isn't particularly obvious.
• 06:35 We need to go back to Microsoft 365,
• 06:38 click on the app launcher and go into Power Apps.
• 06:42 And from the home page, if we scroll down to where it says Your apps,
• 06:43 you should find Project in there if you have Project installed.
• 06:44 So let's click on Project, it's going to
• 06:49 show us all of the projects that we have and
• 06:55 the URL that you see up here is basically our Dataverse URL.
• 07:02 Now, we don't need all of this URL, we just need the part up to dynamics.com.
• 07:08 So let's select it, Ctrl+C to copy, and then we can jump back to Power BI.
• 07:15 So now that we have this, we can simply Ctrl+V to paste and click on Load.
• 07:22 So Power BI is now importing all of our project for the web data.
• 07:26 And depending on how many projects you have, this can take a while.
• 07:29 So take a look at this report.
• 07:32 We have numerous different pages at the bottom, so
• 07:35 it's not just created one report.
• 07:37 It has created multiple,
• 07:39 each of these reports showing our project data in different ways.
• 07:43 Now, the main page,
• 07:44 the Portfolio dashboard gives an overview of all of our projects.
• 07:48 Now, obviously, looking at this report,
• 07:50 there might be some things that I want to switch out.
• 07:52 There might be some things that I want to change.
• 07:54 Maybe I want to change the chart types I'm using or the information that's being
• 07:59 displayed, or maybe I want to format the text and the colors.
• 08:03 Well, we can do all of that from this base report, and
• 08:06 that's exactly what we're going to get onto in the next lesson.

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