How to Connect OneStream and Power BI for Better Data Models and Dashboards
Yes, OneStream offers robust reporting and analytics—but what if you’re looking for something even more powerful? That’s where Power BI comes into play.
Read on to learn how to connect OneStream and Power BI from Richard Leister and Humza Malik .
The OneStream Power BI Connector: A No-Code Integration for Faster Insights
Connecting Power BI to your OneStream platform offers a hands-off approach to create powerful data visualizations to deliver the insights you need faster, all while ensuring data integrity directly from the source.
And the good news is establishing the connection between these platforms is made easy through the official OneStream Power BI Connector. This is a no-code integration developed by Microsoft and OneStream within Power BI. It allows you to directly connect to large OneStream data sets and efficiently report cube data, hierarchies, and other metadata properties.
Key benefits include:
How to Set Up the OneStream Power Bi Connector
To connect using this method, Power BI users must navigate to the Power BI workbook toolbar ‘Get Data’ method and select the OneStream data source.A screenshot of a computer
From there, you simply need to enter your OneStream Cloud URL and authenticate:
How Visualizations in Power BI Enhance the OneStream Experience
Once connected, Power BI takes OneStream’s extensibility concept to another level by enabling Power BI to drill down from consolidation Cube Views to Extended Cube views within one dashboard. OneStream and Microsoft designed it for high performance, ensuring rich and dynamic dashboards.
Want to see how this could work for you? Schedule a demo with one of our OneStream experts today!
Next Steps: Creating OneStream Data Models and Dashboards in Power BI
After the authentication process and data retrieval process, it’s time to put your integration to work! We recommend starting with data model creation and dashboard development.
Data Model Creation
After loading the data/metadata into Power BI, you can alter and enhance your data set into flexible fact and dimension tables with a few custom enhancements. This includes rebuilding dimensional hierarchies while joining external attributes, which enhances drill-down functionality for a navigation experience similar to OneStream.
These tables are joined together based on common fields to form a data model that serves as the foundation of Power BI report development. This data model allows users to navigate various datasets across dimensions. It also improves reporting performance and scalability for future reporting.
Dashboard Development
Now that your data model is established, you can use DAX transformations and calculations in Power BI Desktop to add even more detail.
A benefit of bringing your data into Power BI is the ability to quickly navigate to the lowest levels of your hierarchies without needing OneStream’s Extensibility. This makes reporting faster and puts detailed information at your fingertips. Plus, you can easily share your interactive dashboards with your team using Power BI Online.
Need some guidance to make this happen for your business? We can help! Our data analytics team works closely with our OneStream experts to build this integration and make it work for you. Let’s chat >
Additional OneStream Data Connection Capabilities
While the OneStream Power BI connector is ideal for many business users, OneStream does provide other enterprise-grade connection methods to ensure OneStream remains in alignment with an organization’s overall data strategy for automated integrations, or centralizing data access through an established data warehouse.