Power Automate: Create a Flow to Automate Power BI Report Refresh
In this workshop, you will learn how to automate the refresh for your published Power BI reports that rely on Basic, Advanced, and/or Sky list types from Blackbaud Education Management. Hands-on participation may be limited by your organization's acceptance of the Power Platform application in Blackbaud Marketplace.
You will learn how list design decisions—such as selecting fields, defining filters, and using Student ID as a key—impact downstream reporting in Power BI. The session will also introduce how Power Automate can be used to execute these lists with Blackbaud's certified SKY Add-in connector and the new Education Core endpoint List Execution Job (create) (Preview), creating a repeatable process for keeping report data up to date.
The tips in this session can be applied to any report or down-stream process that relies on data from Blackbaud Education Management lists. This session complements the two-part Power BI series by establishing the data pipeline supporting the report built in Power BI (Part 1): Data Modeling and Validation for Student Reporting and Power BI (Part 2): Designing Interactive Reports for Student Insights.
Advanced Preparation:
- This session will demonstrate concepts from Wednesday's Power Automate sessions.
- Students wishing to build a flow during this session must have the necessary Power Automate license. Use this link for more information on license options.
- The demonstration will walk through this template: Sharing my Power Automate flow: Get multiple Education Management List results as CSV files to SharePoint (list execution job) — Blackbaud Community
Learning Objectives:
- Create SKY Lists and Advanced Lists to extract student and athletics data
- Design list outputs that support downstream reporting in Power BI
- Understand how Power Automate can execute lists and export data to CSV
- Establish a repeatable process for generating and refreshing report-ready data
