How to connect Orlo and PowerBI
In this article
What is Power BI?
Imagine you have lots of different puzzle pieces of information about your business – maybe from social media like Orlo, your sales system like MS Dynamics or Salesforce, your website traffic from Google Analytics, and more.
Power BI is like a super-smart digital workspace – think of it as a much more powerful and visual version of Excel. Instead of just spreadsheets, you have different 'tables' of your puzzle pieces. What's cool is that you can connect these tables – we call these 'relationships' – so you can see how all your different pieces of information fit together to create a bigger picture.
By connecting Orlo to Power BI (especially if you're already using it!), you can easily see your social media data right alongside all your other important business information.
Think of Power BI as a central box where you can bring all your data together from all these different places. Then, you can use Power BI to build really clear and interactive charts and reports that help you understand what's happening across your entire business. Just remember, Power BI helps you see and understand your data – it doesn't store the data itself.
How can Power BI help you?
✅ Save time and improve efficiency by building your dashboard once and having access forever
✅ Provide visibility of your data across your organisation without the need to wait for reports
✅Slice and dice your data as you wish, without the need for data mining or Excel
How to connect Power BI to Orlo
First, you need to download and install the Power BI Desktop app for Windows here.
Then, download and install the latest PostgreSQL ODBC driver for Windows here.
Open Power BI and click on 'Get data', then select 'More'
Search for and select 'ODBC', then click 'connect'
For the Data Source Name (DSN), select 'none'. Then, under Advanced Options, enter the below string and click OK. (Replace our server and database name with the ones you will have been provided with by us)
Driver={PostgreSQL Unicode};Server=XXXXX
.postgres.database.azure.com;Port=5432;Database=XXXXX;sslmode=require;
On the next screen, enter the login credentials you've been provided with, then click 'connect'
Once connected, you should be able to see the file tree below. Expand until you find the 'bi' folder, then tick the data you would like to pull in, then click 'load'
You should see a loading BPX appear. Once the data has been evaluated and the relationships established, you should now be able to access your Orlo data within Power BI!