Setting Up Power BI Embedded on Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017

We got a request from a big company to show them how to integrate Power BI with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017. 

In other to prepare demo content for the training, I had to install Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 and set it up with Power BI. NAV 2017 can integrate with Power BI via four doors -- Power BI Embedded, Power BI service NAV content pack, Power BI Desktop OData and SQL connection to the NAV database. The Power BI Embedded one is more of you bringing in your Power BI dashboard (any one, not necessarily one built from NAV datasets) into NAV reports.

I made sure to take a lot of screenshots along the way. I know this won't be interesting to a lot of us, but for the few who some day will stumble on this when they are stuck getting to make all the frustratingly many moving parts work in sync, this can be a time/life saver.

First, what is Power BI Embedded?

It is when you make your Power BI reports show in another application. Like I did to make my stock analysis dashboard show up on my Nigerian Elite web app. So I embedded it there. And the new NAV 2017 also comes with that ability for you to embed your Power BI dashboards in its reports page.

So below are the visual steps to setting Power BI embedded up in NAV 2017.

In the beginning, there was no Power BI Reports, just a link to setting it up.

Then I followed the setup instructions.

At this stage, I had to go to Microsoft Azure on the account that is the O365 administrator and has Power BI pro enabled. Under Azure Active Directory, I created a new App Registration.

Copied the sign-on URL from the NAV reply URL (in the setup dialog box). Ignore the 8080 showing up in mine, it was the result of following a wrong instruction online, I had to verbatim copy the Reply URL value here before I could get it to work.

Got the App Id and Key.

Set the Permissions and add Power BI service (enabled all the delegate permissions for Power BI service).

Continued the setup on NAV 2017.

Now it was half time.  I was half done.

Then continued.

I got a new dialogbox asking me to authorize azure services to connect to Power BI services.

On clicking on the link, I had to login again.

All set! I can now embed any of my many Power BI reports.

:)

How To Add Additional Charts (Custom Visuals) To Power BI

Yesterday was demo day for me. I did a demo of Power BI for a client for another client. It was the third time I am officially demo-ing Power BI to a large company, and increasingly companies are beginning to give Power BI serious considerations.

In today's post I will be focusing on custom visuals for Power BI -- new chart types you can add to Power BI.

Power BI comes with 27 visualizations (charts), you can easily increase them to over 70 by installing custom visuals, like I have done.

And they are very easy to install. Just head to https://app.powerbi.com/visuals/ and download the ones you like (I recommended at least the Word Count visual).

Next is to import to Power BI Desktop.

And that's it! Now you can add as many custom visuals as you want and create very beautiful dashboards to stay on top of your business data.