Reporting Process Improvements with Power BI Pro?

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to get tips on how we can maximize our efficiency with our reporting process.

1. Currently we use alteryx to do transformations with our data and spit out a giant csv before Power BI Desktop injest the data for our reporting. We have a standard template so we can just delete the current csv table and connect to a new one for a new report on different topics.

1. We then publish the report to power BI Pro and send out access emails through the grant access feature.

1. On a periodic basis we will update our power BI desktop file and republish. Then, we will send out update emails through regranting access to the same individuals.

A couple features that I was looking into with Power BI:

1. Incremental refresh – it seems we don’t have to have power bi constantly load the entire set of data again but just the additional changes
2. It seems that we don’t have to send update emails each time the data gets refreshed as there is a feature that you can turn on

If anyone can suggest other improvements It would be much appreciated.

[amitchandak · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous , for incremental, please refresh

These two with the Append Data method

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2020/04/13/keep-the-existing-data-in-your-power-bi-dataset-and-add-new-data-to-it-using-incremental-refresh/

https://www.thebiccountant.com/2017/01/11/incremental-load-in-powerbi-using-dax-union/

Latest file from the folder

https://medium.com/@wkrzywiec/getting-data-from-the-latest-file-in-a-folder-using-power-query-51dfa4bff711

Incremental Load - Traditional
https://radacad.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-incremental-refresh-in-power-bi-load-changes-only
https://thinkaboutit.be/2020/02/how-do-i-implement-an-incremental-refresh-in-power-bi-free-or-pro/
https://www.nabler.com/articles/power-bi-data-refresh-and-scheduling/
https://www.fourmoo.com/2020/03/11/how-to-configure-incremental-refreshing-in-power-bi-with-datekey-or-date-instead-of-the-default-datetime/

For Emails -

email scheduler
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/report-server/configure-scheduled-refresh
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/e-mail-subscription-time-based-scheduling-now-available/

Alert
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/service-set-data-alerts
https://www.bluegranite.com/blog/from-alerts-to-actions-power-bi-alerts-and-microsoft-flow

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous - Couple things

1. Not sure why you are using Alteryx, it is expensive and Power BI can do all of the transformations itself using Power Query, which is built into the Desktop or can be done in Dataflows
2. Yes, if you had Power BI doing your data ingest, you could use incremental refresh to speed up your data refresh times
3. Publish your PBIX to the Service once. Set automatic refresh, no need to republish and re-grant access every time. That sounds like you are doing a ton of work that you do not need to

A recent article of mine might help: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/Power-BI-Usage-Models-in-Pictures/ba-p/1342820