What are Goals in Power BI?
Normally we talk about the importance of data when making decisions within an organization. Still, there is another situation in which it becomes very valuable. When objectives have to be set within a company or business area.
For this reason, Power BI Service includes the Goals tab. Which allows you to track and monitor those goals defined based on the most relevant metrics for the company, all from a single panel.
The Goals functionality is available to those with the Pro version of Power BI or Premium per user.
How to access Goals in Power BI
We must do it from the Service to access Goals in Power BI. If we open the cloud service from a browser. The Goals tab is available in the side menu of the tool.
If we have never worked with this functionality. It is normal for this tab to appear blank, without any files, as shown in the image above. Anyway, in the recommended section. We have some examples for the Marketing, Sales, and HR departments, among others.
Once you start working with Goals. We will find the most recent panels in this home tab, those we have marked as favorites, and even those that a third user shares with us.
How Goals works in Power BI
Goals works through a new Power BI functionality, Scorecards. Which are a kind of results cards that allow us to see the different goals and sub-goals that have been scheduled, along with the owner of this goal and the status or progress in which is found.
As we can see, in a single panel we have a set of different objectives available in a completely visual way. That allow us to have a global vision of the evolution of the company or of a specific department, in this case, the Sales department.
Also, if we click on a specific objective, we can access its details . In these details we find a broader vision of that specific objective. Together with the activity it has had and the history of its evolution .
Create a Scorecard in Power BI Goals
To create a Scorecard, we must do it from the button that. We have available in the upper right part of the Goals home page. This tells us “New results card” and therefore allows us to generate it from scratch.
When doing this, a side window opens in which we must indicate the name we want to give the panel. A brief description, the possibility of giving it a confidentiality label. And, finally, to which work area we want to link the card of results.
By doing this, we already generate the view to start creating these objectives. As we can see in the following image, the blank panel opens with the “New Goal” button in the center to start working.
If we click on the button, our first goal is created on a blank card that we must configure:
As we can see, in the objective, we can give the current value. The target value in which we set the objective to be met, the current state, and the start and expiration dates. We fill in these fields manually and click the “save” button. In this way, we have already created our first objective:
If we click on this objective, as we have seen before, the details are opened. But in this case, as we have configured it, we have more options.
On the one hand, we can introduce new activity entries that allow us to update the goal with new values associated with a new date.
And on the other hand, we can establish rules so that the state is automatically modified according to the value or date of the goal. For example, if our goal is to reach 200 leads at the end of the month. We can establish that if we are below 100 leads in the middle of the month. We mark the goal in a state of risk.
Connect goals to a Power BI report.
Another way to generate a goal is, instead of typing in the goal’s value and updating it by hand, to connect it to a Power BI report that you have published to Power BI Service. In this way, the value of the objective will evolve automatically according to the data to which we have connected it. To do this, we have to click on the option “Connect to data.”
When we click, a pop-up window opens with the reports we have published in the Power BI Service to choose which report we want to connect that specific objective to.
When choosing the report to connect. It opens in the same window, and we have to select the value we want the objective to correspond to. In our case, we will link it to a card that shows us the total sales.
Thus, in these two ways, we could generate our panel with a whole set of objectives created manually or connected to different reports to monitor the most important metrics in a single view.
Discover and apply all the advantages of Power BI.
Power BI is a tool that can also bring us great benefits when it comes to monitoring our objectives through data, and that is that these can give us great advantages in many areas of our company and situations. From day to day business.
