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Category: Power Apps

Executing Azure Data Factory Pipelines with Power App

Published 2021-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Rayis Imayev has a plan:

One of my university professors liked to tell us a quote, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”, in a way to help us, his students, to stay active in our thinking process. I’m not sure if Francisco Goya, had a similar aspiration when he was creating his artwork with the same name.

So, let me explain my reasons to create a solution to trigger Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipelines from a Power App and why it shouldn’t be considered as a monster 🙂

If that’s not an introduction enticing enough to get you to read the whole thing, I don’t know what is.

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Data-Driven Subscriptions in Power BI

Published 2021-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc shows us how to build data-driven subscriptions using Power BI and Power Automate:

Automate data driven subscriptions with the Power Platform using Power BI and Power Automate! Patrick shows you how to quickly setup a report bursting option for your reports.

Click through for the video. There are a few more steps compared to what you’d do in Power BI Reporting Services, but it’s still pretty straightforward.

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The Power Automate Custom Visual in Power BI

Published 2021-04-27 by Kevin Feasel

Imran Burki tries out a new custom visual:

Using the Power Automate Custom Visual in Power BI is the same process as using any custom visual. We’ll use the Defects Dashboard I created from my last blog post as an example. We want to send a Teams message when we notice defects in a plant require the attention of the plant supervisor. After that, we want to create a meeting in Outlook to discuss findings from our dashboard. Previously, there wasn’t a straightforward way to do this directly in Power BI. However, with the Power Automate Custom Visual, we can create flows directly in Power BI without ever having to leave Power BI! Now that’s cool! Let’s get started.

This is really interesting for setting up rules-based alerting.

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Converting XLS Files to XLSX with Power Automate

Published 2020-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen shows how you can create a Power Automation flow to convert old-style Excel files (in .xls format) to newer-style Excel files (.xlsx) via a web service:

In the scenario I will use a trigger when an e-mail is received and use a rest API provided by https://cloudconvert.com/.

OBS – This is a paid service where you pay by the minute the conversion takes – price from $0.02 to $0.01 per minute.

Check out the comments for some additional information about the web service, including a free tier.

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Dataflows as an Alternative to Incremental Loading in Power BI

Published 2020-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann gives us an alternative to Power BI’s incremental loading using Dataflows:

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you might have noticed my interest in incremental load workarounds. It took some time before we saw the native functionality for it in Power BI and it was first released for premium workspaces only. Fortunately, we now have it for shared workspaces / pro licenses as well and it is a real live saver for scenarios where the refresh speed is an issue.

However, there is a second use case for incremental refresh scenarios that is not covered ideally with the current implementation. This is where the aim is to harvest and store data in Power BI that will become unavailable in their source in the future or one simply wants to create a track of changes in a data source. Chris Webb has beaten me to this article here and describes in great detail how that setup works. He also mentions that this is not a recommended setup, which I agree. Another disadvantage of that solution is that this harvested data is only available as a shared dataset instead of a “simple” table. This limits the use cases and might force you to set up these incremental refreshes in multiple datasets.

Read on for more information.

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