How to track KPIs development using Power BI and Goals

Understand and have transparency on the development of the KPIs is one of the most requested task asked by managers and decision makers, and some times, this is a manual or computer expensive task. Therefore the release of Goals feature by the Power BI team back in May 2021 was a great addition to the Microsoft Power Platform.

(In case you have never heard of it, or haven't used it yet, here a introduction on how to set your goals: Introducing Goals in Power BI | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI.)

Goals do a great job of saving snapshot of selected measures from reports and show how they change over time. Taking a new snapshot every time the source report refreshed. They only downfall of this feature occurred when we want to bring back the data to a report in Power BI. As today, there is not an integrated visual for Goals. And after performed a research on the internet on how to solve the issue I found out the answer in different forums (Thanks again Stack Overflow and Power Bi Forum). Therefore I decided to summarize what I found and maybe help another lost soul like me in the search of knowledge. There are two workarounds:

1. Use Power Automated to extract the information and stored in another location (excel file, SharePoint List, etc.)
2. Add Goals dataset in the PowerBi report.

In this article I will focus in the second one, since is the most easier to implement. For this example lets create an Dashboard call Project Delays and a Scorecard named My First Scorecard.

After create the Scorecard, is necessary to activate a schedule refresh of the dataset to populated it with the most up-to-date values.

After everything is set, we need to enable DirectQuery for PBI datasets and AS in the global options of your Power BI desktop. This allow us to load more than one dataset in your reports.

Then, to add the values from My First Scorecard, first click in Power BI datasets, then search for a dataset with the exact name of the scorecard, in this case My First Scorecard and load the data in the report by selecting Goals and Values tables.

A message should appear alerting about a potential security risk, since another dataset will be include, let's click in Ok and wait that the data is loaded.

Once the data is load in Power Bi, it is ready to be use in our visualizations, in the table Goals, it is found the information about the goals that were created in the Scorecard, and it is where the name of the goal is found. in the other hand, the historical change of the goal, aka the snapshots taken from our measures is stored in Values.

I hope you find this little article useful for your reports.