Empower Your Apps: The Benefits of Power BI Integration

Introduction

If you’re a Power Platform developer or thinking of using the Power Platform as a tool for delivery of apps to your organization, one thing you should care about is user experience. Often times, when building apps for business users, we have a need to use data in a compelling way. When this need arises, you aren’t constrained by the limits of Power Apps. There is a “powerful” add-on that you can leverage for big data and compelling visualization. Read on if you’re interested in why Power BI can be a great add-on to your next Power App.

Power BI Components Expand Visualization Opportunities in Power Apps

Simple charts and graphs in Power Apps are nice, but they have limitations. You need more options. You need more depth. Canvas app controls are limited to just a few like Column, Line, and Pie charts.  

If you are building a Model Driven app, you have a bit more variety in chart types, such as Bar, Area, and Funnel, but then you get to contend with a rather clunky “legacy” developer experience. It’s not great.

You might consider going a completely custom route, building react components and creating a custom control with the Power Apps Component Framework (PCF). That might be worth doing in certain circumstances.

But there is another option. In a Canvas App you can add a Power BI Tile. In the Model Driven world, you have the option to add Power BI Embedded dashboard and report components to your app.

Power BI components enable almost limitless possibilities for data visualization directly in your apps.

The Right Tool for The Job

Data is at the center of almost everything we do today. There is no end to the amount of data we’re collecting and using for decisions in our personal lives as well as at work. This means you probably have at least a few scenarios where number crunching and data processing is a prerequisite to a decision.

In these scenarios, the goal is to use that data to effectively tell a story, answer a question, and guide a decision. While you can do some limited aggregation in Power Apps formulas and Dataverse rollup columns, this usually isn’t enough.  

You need a better tool to help with the big data problem. Power BI is a great way to offload the processing power to something outside of your app. This provides two benefits for our users.  

One, you can boil a literal ocean of data into bite sized actionable data points. Think of scenarios where you’re making decisions based on yearly cycles, and you have 10 years' worth of data that’s feeding your decision today. You can take all that data, apply your gained knowledge and insight to it and provide the key data elements that matter to users. Simply put, there is no good way to do this type of data processing within a Power App alone.

Two, you can do this magic for your user, at speed. Power BI provides the ability to access visualizations for large semantic data models in both real time (DirectQuery) and from Imported data. Each of these connectivity options has benefits and you may choose one over the other based on the amount of data you have, complexity of your data model, and your needs to have the latest data. In either of these cases, the semantic model created for your data will allow more responsive data visualization. Further, in the case of the Imported dataset, all the data is loaded into Power BI memory, making user interaction with the data and visualizations very snappy.

Better UX = Happy Users

So far, I've called out ways Power BI components can make your Power Apps more useful and functional. And hopefully by now this last point has become obvious.  

Integrated delivery, bringing these two worlds together, ultimately makes for a better user experience.

You could create your apps and share them with users. You could create Power BI reports and distribute them in workspaces, embed them in SharePoint, etc. Users could use your apps and the Power BI reports as separate things. While this works, this makes for a disjointed experience for the user.

A better way would be to look for opportunities where it makes sense to use data visualization within the context of your application, and then bring that visualization directly into your app. Design with the user in mind by reducing the amount of context or app switching they must do to accomplish their goal. This will limit opportunities for end user frustration, leading to better overall experience.

Other Things to Consider

Licensing & Subscriptions

The how to of embedding Power BI in your apps

Application Lifecycle / Deployment

Conclusion

In this article I wanted to share how Power BI can be used to enhance the user experience in low code apps in the Power Platform. Elevate and enrich your apps with large datasets and compelling visuals that tell a story and give users what they need to take action. Like anything in the M365, there are things that aren’t fully baked, but the experience of joining your data visuals with Power Apps is getting better every month. Stay tuned for follow up articles where I will talk about how to configure some of these things and bugaboos you will want to avoid.

References

How to create a canvas app with Power BI visual (contains video) - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

Add a Power BI visual in a model-driven app (contains video) - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn