Power BI Goals Introduction – Part 2

In part 1, I gave you an introduction to Power BI Goals and provided some context on what information could be tracked with the feature. I received some feedback that it would be great to do an “unboxing” post, to get a look at the feature. Thus, this post will be that. Part 3 will be a Power BI Goals 101 post where I step you through the process.

Power BI Goals requires you to either have a Power BI Premium per user license or to have access to Power BI Premium and have a Power BI Pro license assigned to you. If you do, then you will notice a new trophy icon when you go to PowerBI.com.

New Icon in PowerBI.com

We could go there first but that’s going to be quite boring and empty as you haven’t created anything yet to view. Instead, let’s put together a quick scoreboard for you to see. As I mentioned at the beginning, we’ll do this in much greater detail in the next post.

Create your Premium or Premium Per User workspace

First step, create a premium workspace and ensure that it is assigned the correct license mode. I have a Premium Per User license, so I’ll assign the workspace that license mode. If you have access to a Premium capacity instance, you’ll should assign the workspace to that capacity.

Create a scorecard

Next we are going to create a scoreboard in the workspace that you just created. The scoreboard hosts your goals. Select New, Scorecard from the workspace and then fill in the Name and Description fields.

Create a goal

Wow, so empty! Let’s put a goal on it so that you can see how these look. Click the yellow button that says +New Goal.

We start filling out the information. Fill in the name, owner defaults to you, and the current and target values. I’ll take you through the quirks next time.

There is a list of colorful statuses that you can assign to your Goal. On track is my favorite! Click the yellow Save button (cutoff a bit on the right).

Check-Ins, History, and Settings, Oh My!

Now let’s look at the Check-In Details screen. Click the icon at the end of the goal to access. You’ll see the screen below.

Let’s do a quick check-in to update the current value and to see what effect it has on the goal. Click the New check-in button.

You can now set the date of the check-in, update the value since this is a manual value, and add a note if you like.

Click Save when done and you’ll see the screen update. Now you have a graph and multiple entries at the bottom.

Let’s click the History link at the top of the page to view recent history. At the bottom, you’ll see an entry for each check-in, along with the current value, % change, status, who updated, and when.

Lastly, let’s click the Settings link to look at the settings pane. Here is where you’ll set the start date and the update cycle.

Goals Home Page

Click Track when you are done making changes. Now let’s click on the Trophy icon in the Power BI left navigation as you now have something to see.

You’ll see any Goals you own, Shared with you, Recent, Favorites, and All scorecards to which you have access.

Hopefully you find this unboxing walkthrough helpful. In the next post, we’ll go through the process as a Goals 101 session, with more details and also how to build out a hierarchy of goals and tricks on connecting your data.