Power BI Action Tracker

This dashboard monitors task health using conditional formatting and icons, offering users clear, actionable insights through an intuitive and interactive layout.

📖 Table of Contents

• The Ask
• Process
• Features

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❓ The Ask

My team came to me asking for a dashboard to help us keep better tabs on task health for our weekly meetings. They usually tracked everything in Microsoft Teams Planner: tasks, updates, due dates—you name it.

I’d built action trackers before using SharePoint lists as the data source, but this time I wanted to try something new. The goal? Make the tracker as hands-off as possible. I set out to create a dashboard that worked mostly behind the scenes—with some help from Power Automate—so my team didn't need to do any additional work.

🛠️ Process

First, I jumped into Power Automate and built a scheduled cloud flow that pulls our team's Planner data and saves it as a JSON file in a designated folder. The flow runs daily at 6:00 A.M. EST. Setting it up was pretty straightforward, although I did have to get creative with mapping some of the Planner buckets and label colors to the tags we actually use.

Once I confirmed the JSON file was coming through cleanly and consistently, I used it as the data source for my Power BI dashboard. To improve the user experience, I added a few fun touches—icons to indicate task progress, list formatting with checkboxes, and conditional formatting to highlight overdue tasks.

And of course, because who doesn’t love a good button—I created a dummy table so the slicer could operate off static values rather than dynamically changing ones. These buttons act as slicers and give users a more intuitive, streamlined way to filter and explore the data.

🚀 Features

• 🏁 Automated Planner Sync
  A scheduled Power Automate flow runs daily at 6:00 A.M. EST to pull Microsoft Planner data into a structured JSON file—no manual steps needed.

• 🎨 Smart Label Mapping
  Planner label colors are mapped to team-specific tags to ensure consistent categorization.

• 📊 Power BI Dashboard Integration
  The dashboard pulls directly from the JSON file for real-time, dynamic visualizations.

• 🌓 Task Progress Icons
  Icons provide a visual cue for task completion status at a glance.

• ✅ Formatted Lists with Checkboxes
  Checklist-style formatting improves readability and makes task tracking easy.

• ⏰ Overdue Task Highlighting
  Conditional formatting helps quickly flag tasks that need immediate attention.

• 🔴 Intuitive Button Slicers
  Slicers powered by a static dummy table offer a clean, user-friendly way to filter views.