Friday, April 5, 2019

Improve Game Night with the Power Platform: Power BI

I am in the middle of working to learn the Power Platform by making a dashboard and application to help select a board game to play for game night. The data structure has been created and current game list imported.

Now we are going to use Power BI to make a Board Game dashboard. My goal is to make a magical list that will update based on some slicers so we can eliminate options that do not fit the people interested in playing.

So first let's get the data in Power BI using XrmToolBox's Power Query (M) Builder. The step by step instructions are available here: https://crmchartguy.com/power-query-builder/

You will also need the Power BI Desktop app. Once you follow the steps from the video above, all of your data will be in Power BI and you can start building visualizations. Within a few minutes of getting the data there I could create a table and create the slicers to dynamically filter that table!

These are simple tasks but I am going to document them for other's just starting out like me.

To create a table, click the table button then select all the fields you want to display in the table. When the table is selected you can drag and drop the columns in the values list on the right hand side to re-order.

To create a slicer, de-select the table and then click the slicer (table with filter) button then select the field you want to filter on.

Once these are created you can just click and drag to move and resize for the look you want.

So in just a few minutes I created the Power BI dashboard below. Moving the slicers will automatically update the results in my table so I can see the games that will fit my requirements based on time and number of people.

My First Ever Power BI Report

You can tell it is working because Scotland Yard was selected as a potential game. Since this is one of the best games ever, it is a success!

Tomorrow we will create a PowerApp to see the Board Game data and enter ratings.


Still some beautification needed but progress is being made


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