Beginner | Flow of the Week: Turning Forms surveys into insights with Flow and Power BI
Hello Flow Community! I’m back with another Flow of the Week, and today we’re focusing on turning survey data into actionable information using Flow and Power BI.
We’re doing something a little different this week — let’s get interactive! First, help by filling out a Microsoft Forms survey about Flow, so we can acquire some data: FILL OUT THE SURVEY.
Done already? Great! Now let’s go build our Flow and do some useful things with the data.
1. Sign in to Microsoft Flow if you haven’t already.
2. Click on My Flows at the top of the page.
3. Select Create From Blank +.
4. Type Forms in the box and choose the trigger When a new response is submitted. Connect to the form from which you want to trigger an action.
Next, let’s add an action.
5. Type SharePoint into the box, and select the action Create item. (I’m doing this because I want all of my form entries moved into SharePoint for recordkeeping before I take any further action with them.)
6. Select your SharePoint server and corresponding list from the drop-down menu, and map your dynamic content fields from Forms into SharePoint as shown below:
7. Open a new web browser tab, go to Power BI, and sign in.
8. Select a suitable workspace — I’m using My workspace. Click on + Create in the top right corner, and select Streaming Data set.
You can see below how I mapped my fields, with the goal of loosely tying them to the questions in the forms. This keeps my dynamic content more clean for selection.
9. Go back to Flow and click on + New Step and then on Add an Action. Type Power BI in the box, and select Add rows to a dataset. Use the dynamic content to map the fields in your dataset to the corresponding fields from the form entries, as shown below:
Now that I have the data being sent to SharePoint for record keeping, and to PowerBI for reporting, I also want to send an email to everyone responding to let them know that their responses are appreciated.
10. Click on + New Step and then on Add an Action. I’m going to use Office365 Outlook, as thats my own email client, but you could use Gmail or whichever service works best for you. Choose the action Send an email.
11. I’ll map the *To field with the dynamic content piece Responders Email , so I can ensure that the email gets sent to every authenticated responder. The rest of the fields can be custom, as shown here:
And now we’ve stored the data, it’s flowing to Power BI for Reporting, and there’s an automated response to the users who participated to let them know that we appreciate their time, as well as linking them to additional places give feedback. That’s it! Once we have some data next week from your responses, I’ll build a dashboard on the Power BI service to reflect responses, as well as create some sentiment analysis so I can be sent alerts based on the data.
Let me know what you think of this tutorial, and what other steps should be added to this Flow. And as always, if you have comments please make a post in the community, tweet us on Twitter, or comment here in the blog comments below!
