Showing hyperlinks on Power BI dashboards and connecting back to Salesforce
You may need to show the summary charts and detail tables to stakeholders in fundamental business practices through dashboards. Although the dashboard allows a drill down to details, it isn't easy to put all the detailed information on a page if the data source is from other systems, such as Salesforce. A web-URL enabling column can help a lot in this situation.
Think about a scenario where you have all sales leads/opportunities in Salesforce and build a dashboard to explain the funnel/summary to your stakeholders. Your stakeholders want to dig into a specific opportunity. The most user-friendly way to make it is to put an URL on the board and let the users click and connect back to the source system. Here are three steps to compete in the setting in Power BI and Salesforce.
1. Confirm the original URL(including domain and prefix, postfix) in the source system
Go to the source system (here is Salesforce), open the detailed information your stakeholders want to view and find the URL. It would help if you found the domain name, regularly generated data, such as opportunity ID or system ID, and the postfix in the URL.
2. create a new column and build a URL in Power BI
Now I assume you have connected BI and Salesforce successfully and already found the relative opportunity data in the BI data layer. Go to the BI data layer and create a column; here, we called it the SFDC link. Edit the logic of the column. The logic is column name = “domain/” & system generates ID & “/postfix.”
3. Set the data category as a web URL to enable users to get linked in between systems
Now you have a column where a combination URL is in it. The next step is to adjust a bit on the data category. We need to set it as a linkable URL to enable users to check information across systems.
Then you can build a visualization component and select the column you just created. To simplify the display, you can tune the config in the visualizations field under the URL icon.
You can make it easier if you don't want to set the URL separately. Another way to add hyperlinks to your Power BI tables and matrixes is to create the URL in the dataset before you import/connect to that dataset from Power BI. I recommend this way if it is easy to generate hyperlinks automatically in the source system. The reason is to save resources and increase system efficiency, the same as the merge and join better competed in the SQL side.
Critical takeaways: let the complex data calculation and manipulation in the source systems. It helps you better manage your Power BI.
