Ability to trigger an email to people highlighted in a Power BI table

[Anonymous]

Hi

I have received a rquirement to be able to trigger emails to people highlighted in a Power BI table. In essence, its the ability to to list people based on a Powerr BI slice/filter within a report, and then trigger an email to each member.

For example, we have a Power BI report that shows staff time capture  for the week - the ask is for the ability to generate an on demand email to each "guiltly" member, requesting them to update their timesheet.

I suspect that this may be possible using a combination of Power Apps and/or MS Flow, but have no real understanding of either and would appreciate any steer in the right direction

Thanks and Regards

Doug

[Anonymous]

Hi @Anonymous 

Yes, you could do this elegantly with a flow.

Another option would be to create an alert for each employee and have that alert trigger when the value is zero. But alerts only work on certain types of visuals, and tables is not one of them.  So you'd need to create a separate dashboard visual for each employee.  If you have many employees, this may be a hassle.  If you have a smaller number of employees, this could work well.  

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/service-set-data-alerts

And here are instructions for setting a data alert using a flow:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/service-flow-integration

HTH

Michele

[cpereyra]

@Anonymous  Where you able to find a solution? I have the same problem. Looking to send email alert to individual emails by filtering the report so they can only see their data. Only solution I found its to create a report for each individual. 

[Greg_Deckler]

I'm not sure you could create a "button" that would do this in Desktop. I suspect that you could possibly do this with Flow triggered by a Power BI refresh but your best bet is probably to use Power App perhaps combined with Flow but I'd need to know more about your setup and source systems and how Power BI would fit with that.

There is a Flow template out there, "Trigger a flow with a Power BI data driven alert". There are also flow templates for sending emails. So the question in that case would be can you send the list of guilty members to the Flow or access that list from Flow.

There is another Flow for "Send an email to any audience when a Power BI data alert is triggered".

So, in the Flow world, your interaction is going to be around Power BI data alerts. So, if you want to do on-demand, you'll probably have to look into Power Apps. The only problem is, there is no data connection for Power BI in Power Apps right now. So, you'd have to access the source data systems where you are getting your information from for your Power BI Desktop file.

[Anonymous]

Thanks S for your feedback which is much appreciated. The backend is a SQL 2016 tabular model. I am pretty confident we can hang something together based on Alerts and will look into this further.

From my experience, direct reaction from someone up the ladder, generally gets a better response than a canned system generated mail ... but we will work with what we have and see what can be accomplished.

[Greg_Deckler]

Perhaps you can set the From address in Flow and then you could send the email message from the resident "President of Computers". 🙂

[Anonymous]

Thanks man .... best I not publish the boss's response in this forum