Rock U - Reporting - BI Template

Transcribed Video Content

Okay. So I want to give you a quick overview of how to use the Power BI template file that we've given you. And so with the goal of this template file is to get you a little bit further along with Power BI without having to start from scratch. Okay. So we've created this quick template that allows you to get started. So basically, what you're gonna do is you're gonna download this template file and you're just gonna double click it. This is gonna launch Power BI Desktop. Make sure you have that installed before you you do that. Okay. So that's gonna take a second to to load up. Okay. Then it's gonna bring up that template file and it's gonna ask you for a little bit of information about your Rock environment. So the first thing it's gonna ask for is your database server. So for our use, I'm just gonna point this at pre alpha. And it's gonna wanna know the database name on that server. Okay. So I'm gonna use RockRMS demo. And so you'll need to make sure that you have this information for your environment. And also, you need to make sure that from your PC that you can actually connect to this. So you need to make sure you talk to your IT, infrastructure person and making sure that you can actually directly connect to your, Rock database server. K. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit load. So now what's gonna go do is it's gonna go out to that database server and it you might have to actually have to log in. I've already done that before so it's not asking me for a login. It's probably gonna ask you for that. So it's going out to your database server and it's starting to download all of the initial data, for that. Now, if you were to do this and if you were not to get any data, make sure that you do run the BI, job on your Rock server. So you need to do that first. That's gonna go out there and, populate all of your BI tables. And then this is gonna go actually connect to those BI tables and bring the data in. So this can take a while. The the pre alpha doesn't have a ton of data in it. So it's it's probably gonna be a little bit faster than yours. But at the same time, it just takes time. So we'll just wait for this to update. Okay. So now that it's updated, it's brought in all the information and we've actually created out of the box inside of this template. We've created some reports for you and so you can see those reports. Before we drill too much into these reports, I want to give you just a really really high level understanding of the different areas of Power BI. This is by no means a full, run through of BI, but I just want to show you a few different areas. The area you'll probably be spending most of your time in is this report view right here. Okay. So this is where you're gonna drag out, your reports and you can have multiple different tabs of reports. And we're gonna go through each of these different tabs in separate videos. So again, most of your time you're gonna be spending here. I'm not gonna really drill into these reports at this point. Again, further videos are gonna are gonna spend a lot more time on each report. But you have a few other views. So if you wanna actually see the raw data behind this, you can go ahead and click on this. And this kind of gives you kind of an Excel version of these tables. So over here on the right hand side, I can see each of the BI model tables. And if I click on them, I can actually see the raw data. Now, is very helpful because as as you're, , working with your reports, often, if you're me, you need to actually come back in here and see what the data looks and to check, what these values might actually hold. When you're over in the in the, reporting side, you just see the names of of each of these columns and you may not understand what's actually in there. Okay? And then the other, area you can go into is relationships. And basically, this is gonna show you how all these, tables connect. Okay? So it's a little bit of a mess, but you can start dragging these around and you can start creating a nice organized view of this. But for the most part, you're gonna spend your your time up here in reports. And if not, you'll spend it down here in data just checking out the data. Now, once you have all this set up, if you want to update your data, inside of your, desktop app here, you'll just hit this refresh. Okay? And so you just hit that and it's gonna go basically do the exact same thing. It's usually a little bit faster because it's only looking for changes, but it still can take some time. Now, in the beginning, this is fine. You can do this. But over time, what you're gonna wanna do is instead publish your report up to the cloud and I'll show you where that is in a second. And then, you're gonna wanna set up an enterprise gateway, which is gonna basically take the data straight from your database and push it into the cloud, behind the scenes. And so you don't have to keep doing this manual process. Until you do that, you gotta come in here, open up this, thing in, this template inside of Power BI, hit refresh and then hit publish to keep your your, your data in the cloud up to date. And that's kind of tedious. So, now once you do that, the publish button is right here. You just push that and it's gonna ask you to log in to your Power BI account. So that's when you actually have to to purchase something. You have to purchase a license for Power BI. There is non nonprofit discounts. So definitely take advantage of that. And then once you do that, you publish that, you just log in and it'll publish up your data and it's really, really easy. So the rest of this will kind of step through as we start making some of these, reports. But that's how you basically take the template file that we've created and it just gives you a nice starting point and we'll unpack each one of these tabs in a separate video.