Smartsheet Power BI Connector: 3 Easy Steps

As organizational workloads have become increasingly complicated and time-consuming, companies are constantly looking for innovative ways to keep their employees productive. However, traditional task management tools struggle to adapt to the varying needs of projects. To address such challenges, organizations are embracing Smartsheet to connect people and technology effectively. Smartsheet enables organizations to make smarter decisions based on real-time data, automate procedures, and manage operations.

In this blog, you will learn about the easy steps to install the Smartsheet Power BI and how it is helping in the real world.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is famously known as a collection of Software Services, Applications, and Connectors that work together to transform disparate data sources into logical, visually engaging, and interactive insights. It is a product that combines a number of cloud-based applications and services to attain the desired goal: organizing, collecting, managing, and analyzing large datasets.

The data could be in the form of an Excel spreadsheet or a group of hybrid data warehouses. Power BI helps you to easily connect the data sources, visualize and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone.

Key Features of Power BI

• User-friendly navigation pane: The Power BI navigation pane provides a simple-to-use interface with datasets, dashboards, and reports options. Users can easily browse between datasets, dashboards they are working on, and reports they are producing in Power BI.
• Customizable Dashboards and Flexible Tiles: A Dashboard of the Power BI interface is a collection of data visualizations that provide useful insights. In Power BI, most dashboards are made from tiles, blocks that contain visualizations. Tiles properly segregate each informative visualization for a clearer perspective. The shape and size of these tiles can be altered as well.
• Help and Feedback Buttons: Help and feedback buttons are used for a variety of settings, including downloading, requesting support and assistance, providing feedback to the Power BI support staff, among others.
• Data and Dataset Filteration: Get Data feature lets Power BI users select from a range of data sources. A few of the data sources are Excel, XML, JSON, Power BI datasets, SQL Server, Power BI dataflows, and MySQL database. Users can filter datasets to create smaller subsets that contain only the relevant data and context. Power BI comes with a number of built-in data connections, including Excel, SQL databases, Oracle, Azure, and Facebook.

What is Smartsheet?

Smartsheet is a software service (SaaS) that offers collaboration and work management. Its tabular user interface enables users to assign tasks, track the project’s progress, manage calendars, and share documents.

Users are allowed to access the Smartsheet data with the help of the Smartsheet Power BI connector in the Power BI Desktop. The Smartsheet data includes sheets and allows users to create interactive reports to expedite their work.

Furthermore, Smartsheet has Software Development Kits (SDKs), providing a higher-level interface for several languages such as C#, Java, Python, and Ruby.

Key Features of Smartsheet

• Collaborative and Adaptability: Smartsheet enables straightforward internal and external collaboration for organizations, regardless of the complexity or location of their work. It also provides users with a solution that can adapt to any project or endeavor at scale, as well as the ever-changing demands of the workplace today.
• Cross-platform application: It keeps users up to date. Power BI has mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android so that users can watch the Smartsheet dashboards while on the move.
• Flexible operations: Without switching between applications, it allows users to make wiser judgments faster. To get insights across tools and organizations, users can use any combination of Smartsheet sheets and reports with data from other Power BI sources (such as CRM, ERP, etc.).
• User-friendly interface: Using Power BI, users of any technical competence level can generate charts and dashboards. Additionally, managers can keep their teams in sync by sharing Power BI dashboards so that everyone can follow the same important performance metrics.
• Security and Scalability: Admin visibility and enterprise-grade security measures help users govern with confidence. The Smartsheet platform scales with businesses, from small teams to enterprise-wide deployments.

Use Cases

Following are the few organizations that utilize Smartsheet:

1) Roche 

Roche Diagnostics has collaborated with Smartsheet experts to rapidly develop a solution to track demand prioritization, distribution, and use of COVID-19 diagnostic and antibody tests in the United States. It also allows for distribution to the most vulnerable areas and timely reporting of pandemic data to federal health authorities.

2) Syngenta

Syngenta oversees agricultural research and development in more than 90 countries, and Smartsheet assists with the company’s objective of “Bringing Plant Potential to Life.”

Syngenta utilizes Smartsheet to connect research laboratories, testing farms, product production, distribution sites, and corporate headquarters to enable quick and accurate decision-making.

Smartsheet Power BI Connection

In order to install the Smartsheet Power BI connector, first install the Power BI Desktop application.

Step 1: Install the Power BI 

Power BI Desktop

Step A: Open a Browser and Locate Microsoft’s Power BI. Download Page or paste the following http://aka.ms/pbidesktop into the browser and click Enter.

Step B: The Microsoft Store application will open and display the following image the Power BI Desktop application. Now, click on the ‘Download Free’ button.

Step C: After the application is downloaded, Click on Get, and the installation process will begin.

Step D: Now, choose where you would like to install the application on any compatible device or the current device. On choosing, the installation will begin.

Step E: Once the process is finally completed, hit the Launch button.

Step 2: Install the Smartsheet

Once the Power BI is installed, you can easily install the Smartsheet Power BI connector. 

This section navigates us through the steps to install the Smartsheet.

Step A: Go to Apps > Get apps in the upper-right corner in the nav (navigation) pane.

Step B: Select the Apps tab in AppSource and search for the service you want.

Step C: Go to Smartsheet > Get it now.

Step D: For the ’Install this Power BI App?’ prompt, select Install.

Step E: Select Smartsheet tile from the Apps pane.

Step F: In Get started with the new app, select Connect.

Step G: Select oAuth2 > Sign In for Authentication Method.

Step H: Enter your Smartsheet Credentials and complete the authentication procedure when requested. 

Step I: The Smartsheet Dashboard appears once Power BI has finished importing the data.

Note:

A Smartsheet admin account is preferred for connecting and loading the Power BI template app as it has additional access.

Step 3: Modify and distribute 

Once the Smartsheet template application is installed, the Smartsheet workspace is created. In the workspace, users can change the report and dashboard.

Step A: In order to view all the contents in the new Smartsheet workspace, in the nav pane, select Workspaces > Smartsheet. 

Step B: The below image is a view of the content list for the workspace. Click on the upper-right corner, Update app button if you wish to start distributing the app to the teammates.

Step C: Select Reports and Datasets to see the other elements in the workspace.

Conclusion

Today, Smartsheet is used by 90% of Fortune 100 businesses to transform work into dynamic work by combining collaboration, workflows, and content management on a single adaptable and secure platform.

You discovered in this blog that Smartsheet is a dynamic work platform that enables anybody to manage projects, automate workflows, and quickly build new solutions — all with no-code tools and the security that IT requires. You also learned how to install Smartsheet Power BI in your systems. You can integrate many such platforms using Hevo.

Share your experience of learning about Smartsheet Power BI Connector! Let us know in the comments section below!