If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the world of business intelligence lately, you’ve seen the shift of Microsoft Power BI from the service built-in to Office 365 to the standalone offering from http://powerbi.com.  There are various data sources available sources but one I use frequently is Dynamics CRM Online.  There have been various blogs that give tutorials and examples of getting your CRM online data into Power BI.  I’ve written previous posts on gotchas when using Power Query with CRM Online in part 1 and part 2.  In today’s post, I want to show you how to leverage the Power BI service and construct your data source so that you can have date tables and OData sources that you can configure scheduled refreshes on. 

Why Do We Care, and What’s a Date Table?

I had my Excel-based file with all my data models and Power View dashboards published to Power BI in Office 365, cool.  But, I couldn’t refresh the Odata data source for CRM online. 

Boo!  Besides, if you’re seen the writing on the wall, they haven’t made any updates I can see to Power BI in Office 365.  But they make continuous updates to the standalone Power BI service and are constantly adding new content packs for data sources.  During its preview and initial release of this service, I don’t believe it was usable for my specific needs and complex DAX calculations I was doing.  While the overall service was great, it didn’t support data labels and had many other limitations. 

If you need more info on DAX, see these resources:

• QuickStart: Learn DAX Basics in 30 Minutes
• DAX basics in Power BI Desktop
• Tutorial: Create your own measures in Power BI Desktop
• Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) Reference

Over the past few months, all that has changed.  There have been a ton of improvements that really make it very flexible and usable, and have features / chart types that aren’t in Excel (2013 but are coming to Excel 2016).  So I wanted to leverage these new abilities with my dataset and see what I could do and if it would offer me.  What you do is use the free download program Power BI Desktop, build your datasets and publish to Power BI for use.

The reason we care about this is because for those times when you need to use a date table and you want to use that date table in Power BI.  What’s a data table?  In Excel, you can create a quick pivot table and have built-in time intelligence for grouping by days, months, etc. and filter by last week, last year, and so on.  When you use a Power Pivot data model or dataset in Power BI, you have to build your own time intelligence.  You do this with a date table.  It’s a flat table that contains a row record for every day for a given set of years (depending on the years you need for your dataset).  There are columns that carve this date into different needed formats as desired like week ending, month, year, quarter, etc. 

The Problem

Originally, I created a date table in Power BI desktop using a query function.  This worked great and auto-generated all the data I needed for my query.  After uploading to Power BI, when I tried to schedule a refresh it said it required an on-premise gateway to connect to.  What?  Basically, because I generated my date table with a query, every time you refresh the data source it needed to refresh the date table.  It saw this function query as something it needed to connect on-premise for, and therefore wouldn’t work. 

In case you want the query to play with, here is the formula to use (this is not my own and I believe it was taken from here):

let CreateDateTable = (StartDate as date, EndDate as date, optional Culture as nullable text) as table =>

  let



    DayCount = Duration.Days(Duration.From(EndDate - StartDate)),

    Source = List.Dates(StartDate,DayCount,#duration(1,0,0,0)),

    TableFromList = Table.FromList(Source, Splitter.SplitByNothing()),   

    ChangedType = Table.TransformColumnTypes(TableFromList,{{"Column1", type date}}),

    RenamedColumns = Table.RenameColumns(ChangedType,{{"Column1", "Date"}}),

    InsertYear = Table.AddColumn(RenamedColumns, "Year", each Date.Year([Date])),

    InsertQuarter = Table.AddColumn(InsertYear, "QuarterOfYear", each Date.QuarterOfYear([Date])),

    InsertMonth = Table.AddColumn(InsertQuarter, "MonthOfYear", each Date.Month([Date])),

    InsertDay = Table.AddColumn(InsertMonth, "DayOfMonth", each Date.Day([Date])),

    InsertDayInt = Table.AddColumn(InsertDay, "DateInt", each [Year] * 10000 + [MonthOfYear] * 100 + [DayOfMonth]),

    InsertMonthName = Table.AddColumn(InsertDayInt, "MonthName", each Date.ToText([Date], "MMMM", Culture), type text),

    InsertCalendarMonth = Table.AddColumn(InsertMonthName, "MonthInCalendar", each (try(Text.Range([MonthName],0,3)) otherwise [MonthName]) & " " & Number.ToText([Year])),

    InsertCalendarQtr = Table.AddColumn(InsertCalendarMonth, "QuarterInCalendar", each "Q" & Number.ToText([QuarterOfYear]) & " " & Number.ToText([Year])),

    InsertDayWeek = Table.AddColumn(InsertCalendarQtr, "DayInWeek", each Date.DayOfWeek([Date])),

    InsertDayName = Table.AddColumn(InsertDayWeek, "DayOfWeekName", each Date.ToText([Date], "dddd", Culture), type text),

    InsertWeekEnding = Table.AddColumn(InsertDayName, "WeekEnding", each Date.EndOfWeek([Date]), type date)   

  in

    InsertWeekEnding,

    #"Invoked FunctionCreateDateTable" = CreateDateTable(#date(2014, 1, 1), #date(2019, 1, 1), null)

in

    #"Invoked FunctionCreateDateTable"

It looked like this in the editor:

After you publish this to Power BI, it loaded and I could see my reports but after going to the schedule refresh settings of the dataset, it wants to configure a gateway.  This shouldn’t be necessary and is what we’re going to fix to allow us to refresh our CRM Online OData source automatically. 

The Fix

The idea here to make this work is that we need to EMBED the date table in the data model as a data source so Power BI doesn’t think we need to refresh it from an external source.  You’ll actually see this if you look at the demo that Microsoft builds when you just load the default dashboards using your tenant’s org.

So how do we do that? 

1. First create a date table in Excel either with formulas or Power Query.  If you use Power Query, be sure to load it to a worksheet.  What we need is just the data in an Excel table.  Even though the documentation says it will read Excel tables, I couldn’t get it to work unless I added the table to a Power Pivot data model.  Save this Excel file somewhere for use in a minute.
2. Load up Power BI Desktop, and click File –> Import –>  Excel contents:
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Choose your XLS workbook and then it will throw a prompt that will say it will import the contents.  Click Start:
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Click Copy Data on the next screen.  This is the part that will embed the data into the Power BI data model. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. For my needs, I had to add a couple calculated columns.  Do so as you need for your dataset.
6. It’s also good practice for things to sort right to change how the sort works on your month names.  Otherwise, Power BI will sort them in name order, not date order (it would show April first instead of January).  You do this by changing the sort order for the month name column.  To do that, open the model, click the MonthName column and on the ribbon click the Sort By Column button, and click the column that contains the numeric value of the month (1=January, 12=December, etc). 
   
   
   
   
   
   
7. Build out your OData feed to CRM Online as you would before, and be sure to create a relationship between your date table and your other tables:
   
   
   
   
   
   
8. Once you’re done with your data and building reports and visualizations, publish to Power BI.  Click File –> Publish –> Power BI. 
9. Now we can schedule our data refresh.  Under Datasets, click the ellipsis, and click Schedule Refresh:
   
   
   
   
   
   
10. You will set your credentials for the OData source (CRM Online), then flip to enable the refresh and set the options accordingly.  Then for a first run, you can click Refresh Now to ensure it works.  Awesome!
    
    

You can read more about importing Excel data into Power BI via these resources:

• Excel data in Power BI 
• Import Excel workbooks into Power BI Desktop

If you haven’t started using Power BI yet, I’d highly recommend you check it out.  I’m still waiting for the Windows Phone app to release but the Windows 8 app works really nice.  Please contact us if you’d like to learn more about how Power BI can help you analyze Dynamics CRM!