We’re very excited to announce that the Power BI integration in Dynamics 365 and model driven Power Apps, which shipped as a preview last December, is now generally available. Dynamics 365 and model driven Power Apps give organizations the ability to quickly build essential line-of-business apps in a low-code environment, increasing agility and modernizing processes. Since these apps are all built on top of Dataverse, they’re backed by your core business data. With this integration directly on views, information workers are now able to tap into this data and explore it using Power BI’s powerful data analytics capabilities without ever needing to leave their app. Just click the ‘Visualize this view’ button and let Power BI automatically create a report on top of the exact data you were looking at.
Of course, with this integration moving to general availability, there are lots of new features as well. Read on to learn about all the recent improvements.
Saving reports to the Power BI service
You can now save the reports you create through this integration back to the Power BI service. Once you save this report, it becomes a normal Power BI report. You can share it, package it in an app, subscribe to email updates, or even download the .pbix to make further modifications.
Once you’ve finished your exploration and are ready to save, just click the save button in the app bar, give it a name, pick a workspace, and, if enabled in your org, set a sensitivity label. You’ll be able to save to any workspace you have a Contributor, Member, or Admin role assigned. As a free user, you’ll be able to save to your personal workspace.
Once you saved the report, we’ll give you a link to access it in the Power BI service. Clicking the link will open it for you in a new tab.
The dataset that gets saved through this flow is automatically configured as DirectQuery with SSO enabled. This means that it will always be up to date and respect Dataverse security settings. Of course, once you’ve saved the report and dataset, you’ll be able to go into the dataset’s settings and change it later.
If you already have credentials in Power BI configured for the specific Dataverse environment you’re connecting to, and it isn’t set to SSO, we won’t automatically override this. Instead, we’ll ask you to decide how you want to handle your credentials. You can choose to either keep what’s already stored in Power BI or override it to use SSO. If you decide to keep what’s already in Power BI, your report may show different data once you view it in the Power BI service. If you decide to override, this will also update your existing datasets connected to the same source.
Once the report is in the Power BI service, that is where you’ll access it going forward. However, if you’d like make it a standardized report included in your app, you can always choose to embed it back into the app.
Display names
We’re also excited to now support display names within the Power BI report, which was another popular request during preview. Now whenever you visualize, the names of the fields in the Your Data pane will match the same column names you see in the view.
The field names will match exactly what you see in the view, which means if you’re seeing localized names based on the language you’re viewing the app in, the names in the Power BI report will also be localized.
We’ve also added display name support to the Dataverse connector in Power BI Desktop. Learn more about that improvement in the release summary blog.
Quality of life improvements
Of course, we’ve also made several quality of life improvements as well. We’ve made some performance optimizations that significantly improve the load time for the longest running reports. We’ve also removed some of the extra system columns that showed up in the Your Data pane, so the list of fields is easier to read through. There are a few system columns still remaining, but we’ll continue to improve this experience in future updates.
Get started now
Now that we’ve added many of the requested features, and the integration is generally available, it’s a great time to try out this integration, and if you’re an app creator, enable it for your end users. You can add it to any app through the app settings.
For now, you’ll need to enable per app, but in the future, we plan to enable this integration by default for apps. Once we have a timeline for this, you’ll be able to find out more in a future Power Platform release notes announcement.
If there are any other improvements you’d like to see, please let us know! Each of the Power Platform products are incredibly useful on their own, but the power is really unlocked when they’re used together, so you can expect to see us continuing to invest in making these end-to-end solutions easier to build.