Write Back using Power BI is now a native feature of Power BI under Microsoft Fabric.

Power BI was officially launched in July 2015 to market. Power BI gone through lot of changes during this 9+ years and it is continuously getting upgraded to keep the market demands in mind by Microsoft.

One of the market demands was how to write back from the Power BI dashboard into the database back to add, alter or delete data visible in the Power BI dashboard. There were no such features available in Microsoft Power BI until November 2024.

To cater this client demands we used to follow the traditional way of integrating or embedding Power Apps within Power BI. User used to add, alter or delete data using Power apps forms which will get synchronized with underlying data sources using Power Automate. This approach had lot of challenges and operational pain.

The following traditional architecture was followed.

Microsoft Fabric new native write back features announcement at Microsoft Ignite in November 2024 is a game changing one for the Data Visualization world. ?Now Power BI supports native write back option to backend database. This seamless solution makes data visualization people’s life easy to modify data directly from Power BI. ?In this new feature, it is just needed to open the Power BI report and can simply click a data in the report, update or changes the data and it will automatically write back the changes to the database.

Key new features of new integrated Write-Back option in Power BI:

1.????? Integrated System and Minimizing Technical Obstructions: Edit and input data directly within Power BI reports and no need to integrate Power Apps or Power Automate. Without extensive technical knowledge, BI user can now interact with data more effectively, as no need to understand the underlying automation processes.

2.????? Real Time Update: Data changes are written back to the data source on real time manner and reports/dashboards shows the latest data on real time basis.

3.????? Optimized Performance: It can handle large-scale data operations efficiently & effectively using Microsoft Fabric’s robust infrastructure.

4.????? Seamless Experience: It is a unified interface and allowing BI users to manage both read and write functionalities without switching contexts.

New native write back vs Old traditional write back option:

Possible business use case of this new feature:

1.????? Join meetings with different departments can be helping to change the data based on discussions and decisions on live mode from dashboard itself.

2.????? On critical executive or leadership level meeting, live target, projections etc type of data can be changed live in the meeting from the dashboard itself based on executive or leadership decisions.

3.????? In absence of data engineering team, BI user can correct the data from dashboard itself in case of wrong data populated.

Summary:

Microsoft finally connected the interruption between analytics and data management / data engineering and providing an integrated platform that allows users to act on their insights without exiting the Power BI ecosystem. The write-back feature improves cooperation and decision-making across these scenarios by granting real-time data updates within Power BI, making it a powerful tool for dynamic business circumstances.?

This feature can lead to have wrong data updated by BI users if not managed under proper BI governance which can be a risk and negative impact of this feature.

Copyright Acknowledged.

Source of the write up from the following links:

?https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/data/power-bi-write-back-power-apps

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/transforming-power-bi-new-era-native-write-back-sethuraman-a7egc/

https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/BRK202?source=sessions

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/hidden-revolution-power-bi-data-write-back-zolt%C3%A1n-tan%C3%A1cs-wayzf/

https://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2024/11/microsoft-ignite-announcements-nov-2024/

#microsoftfabric #powerbi #writeback #datavisualization

?

?