Power BI and Project Online integration

[faizanahmad]

I have a few questions.

I was able to connect the above two using ODATa feed.

Now, I want to do the following things.

1. Determine if we can pull project data for only one project instead of all projects in the portfolio.
2. Determine if old RAG (Red Amber Green) statuses can be put into new status reports to show the previous RAG status.  The idea here is to determine if data in past reporting periods (or their reports) can be queried and placed into the report being generated for the current period.  Project Online does not store the over-written data so BI will likely have to have a means to store the field itself and then query that.  Versioning can be
3. Investigate content packs.  In attached slide show, slide 10 has a portfolio report that would demonstrate we can invoke an out of the box report that we will find useful.
4. Investigate if we can invoke the reading or on-demand creation of a BI report (Status Report) from Project Online.  Below is a picture of where we should be able to trigger or view a customized status report. The report can be viewed either by linking to Power BI (enterprise) or the report can be embedded within the page.  We can also create a custom menu item in case the built in menu item (highlighted in yellow) cannot be configured to invoke anything to do with Power BI.
5. Determine if Power BI can read from a spreadsheet stored on a network drive.  This will simplify the inclusion of data currently in Planview that will be used in other report that BI will be used to create, along with data in Project Online.  Data from Planview can be easily exported into an Excel Spreadsheet.  Data from Project Online can also be easily exported to a spreadsheet which may be what we do to store snapshots of Project Online data over time.  This may assist in item 2 above (perhaps a weekly export from Project Online can create the source of the RAG status from earlier periods. 
6. Determine if Power BI can run reports at night/scheduled.  This is to avoid the wait of extracting data that we believe is unavoidable due to cloud lag. (I forgot to not mention this item when I reviewed the take aways at the end of our meeting).

Any help is appreciated.

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

@faizanahmad

1. Determine if we can pull project data for only one project instead of all projects in the portfolio. You should be able to achieve this by customizing your OData string. You'll find some examples here
2. Determine if old RAG (Red Amber Green) statuses can be put into new status reports to show the previous RAG status.  The idea here is to determine if data in past reporting periods (or their reports) can be queried and placed into the report being generated for the current period.  Project Online does not store the over-written data so BI will likely have to have a means to store the field itself and then query that.  Versioning can be - Power BI does not have a versioning mechanism, a good solution was outlined in this post.
3. Investigate content packs.  In attached slide show, slide 10 has a portfolio report that would demonstrate we can invoke an out of the box report that we will find useful. - There is no attachement to this post, Content Packs are being phased out and replaced with Apps.
4. Investigate if we can invoke the reading or on-demand creation of a BI report (Status Report) from Project Online.  Below is a picture of where we should be able to trigger or view a customized status report. The report can be viewed either by linking to Power BI (enterprise) or the report can be embedded within the page.  We can also create a custom menu item in case the built in menu item (highlighted in yellow) cannot be configured to invoke anything to do with Power BI.  - You can customize viewing reports to a pretty large degree with Embedded, using filters etc, but I don't know the specific interactions with PO.
5. Determine if Power BI can read from a spreadsheet stored on a network drive.  This will simplify the inclusion of data currently in Planview that will be used in other report that BI will be used to create, along with data in Project Online.  Data from Planview can be easily exported into an Excel Spreadsheet.  Data from Project Online can also be easily exported to a spreadsheet which may be what we do to store snapshots of Project Online data over time.  This may assist in item 2 above (perhaps a weekly export from Project Online can create the source of the RAG status from earlier periods. - Yes, Power BI can access these files provided the user has permissions to do so.
6. Determine if Power BI can run reports at night/scheduled.  This is to avoid the wait of extracting data that we believe is unavoidable due to cloud lag. (I forgot to not mention this item when I reviewed the take aways at the end of our meeting). - Yes you can schedule refreshes within Power BI. Using Import, (which this would be) you can schedule a refresh up to 8x per day. You will need to install a gateway to do this if you are using on premises files.