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atrain101
New Member

Can Power BI be used for quick metric reporting

Hi All,

 

I'm looking for a quick and easy way to generate raw data into useful metrics for my employer. For various reasons, I'm unable to sufficently test Power Bi myself, so I'm having a difficult time figuring out if it's the right application that will allow me to:

 

  • Allow users to quickly upload raw, unformatted .CSV files into a dedicated dashboard that will track monthly trends across multiple categories
  • Automatically run formulas that compare multiple datasets whenever new files are uploaded. Ideally this would also update dedicated dashboards

 

Currently, I manually prepare reports in Excel using 3+ datasets. A lot of time is spent preparing the data with VLOOKUPs and IF formulas, creating Pivot tables and then manually updating a dashboard with new monthly numbers. 

 

If I could simply upload the .CSVs into Power BI and let it do 99% of the work, that would be my best-case scenario. Is this realistic, or will I still need to do a lot of the manual work?

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Anonymous
Not applicable

Yes it can.  As always the devil is in the details, but on a whole it can do exactly that.

 

One way you could do exactly how you were describing is to have a shared folder that hosts the CSV files.  Users copy their data over the top and go into their Power BI file (either desktop or web service).  They then tell their Power BI to refresh and it will grab the latest data and refresh the reports.

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3 REPLIES 3
Anonymous
Not applicable

Yes it can.  As always the devil is in the details, but on a whole it can do exactly that.

 

One way you could do exactly how you were describing is to have a shared folder that hosts the CSV files.  Users copy their data over the top and go into their Power BI file (either desktop or web service).  They then tell their Power BI to refresh and it will grab the latest data and refresh the reports.

Can Power BI update dashboard from files that were uploaded onto a shared Network drive, or does it specifically have to be on something like SharePoint Online.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Yep works great.  All you need to do is make sure that the username you supplied to the gateway has access and that the filepath is the same in both your desktop file and in the gateway.  For example, don't use "C:\Folder\File.xlsx" you would use "\\Computer\Folder\File.xlsx"

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