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Gray icon with bar graph inside Microsoft Power BI Output Tool

The Microsoft Power BI Output tool uses the Power BI REST API to upload a dataset from your Alteryx workflow to the Power BI web application. From there, you can create and share dashboards containing any number of data visualizations and reports. See Microsoft Power BI for additional details.

See Designer Compatibility with Data Connectors to maintain full functionality of the OneDrive connector.

Important

This tool is not automatically installed with Designer. To use this tool, download it from the Alteryx Marketplace.

See Microsoft's Push datasets limitations for limitations and additional details.

Due to Power BI API limitation, Designer can't write DateTime values. Convert the DateTime values to strings before uploading the dataset to Power BI.

Sign In to Power BI

The OAuth method is used for authentication, so you can either use the default Alteryx application via Sign in via Internet Browser or you can provide your own API application via Provide authentication information. See the Custom API Application Setup for the information on how to create your own API application.Custom API Application Setup

You can use the default Alteryx application (Sign in via Internet Browser) to schedule workflows for up to 6 months. However, if you select Use as service principal after you select Provide authentication information, you can set the expiration of the token according to your company policy and the scheduled workflows won’t be associated to a single user. This is convenient, for example, if a user leaves the company and their account is disabled, causing workflows to not run.

Power BI Output requires Client Secret even when connecting with Client ID and Secret, Tenant ID without using as service principal. Contact your administrator to request the secret which is a Secret Value, not Secret ID.

Tool Configuration

The following steps show you how to work with datasets:

  1. To create a new dataset in Power BI, go to the configuration window, then Data tab. Choose  the Workspace you want to work with and  select New Dataset.

  2. Go to Options > Output Options. Check if Create is the default option.

  3. You can specify your own Dataset Name and Table Name fields if you don’t like the default ones.

    Note

    Power BI allows you to have multiple datasets of the same name, so we recommend to modify Dataset Name.

  4. To work with an existing dataset, select it from the list of existing datasets, and in the configuration panel Options tab, choose an operation to perform:

    1. Append—appends new rows to the existing dataset.

    2. Overwrite (keep existing columns)—deletes existing rows (all records in the dataset) and adds new rows to the table as per given input. The input column names are ignored, and the structure of the existing schema will not change.

    3. Overwrite (update columns)—updates existing schema by an input structure and adds new rows to the table.

      Note

      With this option, the structure of the existing schema changes according to the input, therefore some references in your existing report might not work.

  5. You can update multiple tables in the dataset at once, but first, you have to provide the mapping between the incoming connection and the existing table in the selected dataset.

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