Trigger flows from your Power BI report!

The monthly Power BI updates always contain some interesting minor updates. But every now and then, we see a pretty cool new big feature, and this month, you're in luck! From now on, it’s possible to trigger a flow from your Power BI report and include your Power BI filters.

How does it work? It’s actually pretty simple:

1. Download the Power Automate visual from the app store

2. Add the Power BI fields required for the flow to the visual

3. Import an existing flow or create a new one. In the flow you can specify which Power BI fields to use at which step

4. Click apply and the flow button will appear

5. Customize the button and the flow is ready to be triggered

That’s it! Sounds easy, right?

Once the flow is triggered, it will run with the selected Power BI fields and will apply all existing filters. Also, the usage of the button can be restricted to certain people or user groups. I understand this might still sound a bit abstract. So how can this benefit you? See some examples below:

Turn your data into actions! You can send a mail to a group of people by just clicking the flow button. Remember, existing filters will be passed into the flow. For example, each shop has to send a monthly update about their stock. You have email addresses for each shop in your dataset and you can easily create a filter in your Power BI report that states if a shop did or did not update their stock count. Select this filter and trigger the flow. Each shop that did not update their stock yet will get a reminder! This reminder can be a simple text, customized by you in the flow. But you can also add any Power BI fields to send some additional information, specific for each shop!

Another example is to send data into an existing Excel file. You have a great Power BI report, but you need to report quarterly to your management team and they would like to have some charts in a word document. Just set up your Excel table and charts. Set the filters in your Power BI report and trigger the flow. Your charts will be updated!

Or how about integrating your flow with Teams? Set up the flow and update your weekly message with some key numbers to any Teams channel!

This is all new for us as well, but we're excited to try it out!

Do you see any other applications? Feel free to share them!