Power BI with Microsoft Dataverse data

Introduction

Power BI is a comprehensive collection of services and tools that you use to visualize your business data.The following connector, templates, and features are available that make it easy to visualize and analyze Microsoft Dataverse data or the Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service apps data with Power BI.

1. Dataverse connector: Dataverse allows you to connect directly to your data using Power BI Desktop to create reports and publish them to Power BI. From Power BI, reports can be used in dashboards, shared with other users, and accessed across platforms on Power BI mobile apps. This connector is the most recent version and uses the tabular data stream (TDS) protocol.

 Following are the steps to connect to dataverse: 

1. Open Power BI Desktop. Select File > Get Data > Power Platform.
    
2. Select the Dataverse connector, and then select Connect.
    
3. Expand the environment you want in the list of environments, select the tables you want, and then select Load.
    
4. Select from the following Data Connectivity mode options:
   Import: We recommend that you import data to Power BI wherever possible. With this mode, data is cached in the Power BI service and imported on a scheduled interval.
   
   DirectQuery: Connects directly to the data in Dataverse. Use this mode for real-time data retrieval. This mode can also more strictly enforce the Dataverse security model.
    
5. Select OK. You might be prompted to sign in using the same credentials you use to connect to Power Apps and Dataverse. Select Connect.
    

2. Common Data Service (legacy) connector: This is the earlier version of the connector. Use this connector when the query results will be greater than 80 MB. This version also supports paging of the query results and building reports that use the image data type

3. Dataflow templates: Dataflows help organizations unify data from disparate sources and prepare it for consumption. You can easily create dataflows using familiar, self-service tools to ingest, transform, integrate, and enrich big data. Once you create a dataflow in Power Apps, you can get data from it using the Common Data Service connector or Power BI Desktop Dataflow connector

4. Power BI template apps: Power BI template apps are integrated packages of pre-built Power BI dashboards and reports. Using Power BI template apps with Dynamics 365 Sales provides a convenient, powerful, and quick way to access and analyze your sales data.

5. Embed Power BI reports on a form: You can use Power BI reports in Power Apps model-driven apps to bring rich reporting and analytics to your system forms and empower your users to accomplish more.

6. Embed Power BI reports on a system dashboard: Use can add Power BI reports to the dashboards and include in the solution with Environment Variables for ALM.

7. Tabular Data Stream (TDS) endpoint: Use the TDS endpoint for Dataverse to view table data in Power BI Desktop.

View table data in Power BI Desktop

1. Sign into Power Apps, and then select the appropriate environment from the top-right corner.
    
2. On the left navigation pane expand Data, select Tables, and then select Analyze in Power BI on the command bar.
   The pbids file for your environment is downloaded to your browser’s default download folder.
    
3. Open the .pbids file to access it in Power BI Desktop.
    
4. The pbids file is loaded in Power BI Desktop. In the dialog box, select Organizational account, select Sign in, and then in the browser window that appears, select or enter your credentials.
    
5. In the dialog box in Power BI Desktop, select Connect. The environment appears in the Power BI Desktop Navigator window. Expand it to view the tables available to analyze. Select a table to preview its data.
    
6. After selecting the tables, you want to analyze, select Load to build a report.