Integrating Workday with Power BI & Excel: Data Analysis and Reporting

Workday is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) application that has proven crucial to the HR and financial operations of many businesses. 

On the other hand, Excel and Microsoft Power BI are effective tools for reporting and data analysis. Furthermore, Power BI has a number of additional capabilities that allow you to manage and prepare your data for analysis, including as data modeling, data shaping, and data transformation. 

You can use Power BI to transform Workday data into meaningful insights, allowing you to make better decisions and drive development for your business. Workday integration with Power BI and Excel may provide businesses a streamlined workflow and help them unlock the full potential of their data. 

Activating Power BI’s Potential

A powerful business analytics solution that enables firms to share insights throughout the enterprise is Microsoft Power BI. 

Users may connect to different data sources with Power BI, turn data into interactive reports and dashboards, and obtain insightful information in real-time. 

When you connect to Workday data in Power BI, you may get and analyze data from your Workday account. You must provide your Workday credentials, such as your login and password, to connect to Workday data. Then, in Power BI, pick the relevant data source from the available Workday data sources. Its user-friendly design and drag-and-drop functionality make it usable by both technical and non-technical users, facilitating data-driven decision-making at all organizational levels.

By using this functionality, users may take use of Excel’s robust data analysis tools while dealing with Workday Power BI data.

This connects Power BI to your Workday account, allowing you to access the data you need for your research. To safeguard the confidentiality and safety of your data, it is critical to adhere to established security and data privacy rules while connecting to Workday data in Power BI.

Create Visualizations

The act of producing graphical representations of your data in Power BI to better understand patterns and trends is known as visualization. Charts, graphs, maps, and other visual representations are examples of visualizations. Power BI provides a variety of visualization choices that may be tailored to your specific requirements. 

Creating visuals in Power BI entails selecting the data to be used, selecting the right visualization type, and customizing the visualizations to meet your needs. Visualizations assist to bring data to life and make complicated data sets easier to interpret. They also allow you to present your results and ideas in a clear and straightforward manner. Creating good visualizations is a critical stage in the data analysis process because it helps you to gain insights and make data-driven choices.

Excel: The Proven Data Analysis Partner

Since the 1980s, Microsoft Excel has been a standard tool for data analysis and reporting. 

Excel is sometimes referred to as the “king of spreadsheet applications.” 

Increase the standard of your performance. Improving performance begins with understanding where you are now. Excel gains even more power when combined with other tools and data sources, providing many options for data processing and analysis. Workday Benchmarking allows you to compare your performance to that of your peers in our customer community to discover where you thrive and where you can improve.

Users use Excel can conduct intricate calculations, develop unique formulae, and produce aesthetically attractive charts and graphs. 

Experts from a variety of fields and industries frequently use it because to its versatility and familiarity. 

Why Integration

You can quickly and easily obtain insights into your organization’s data, uncover trends and patterns, and make data-driven choices by integrating Workday data with Power BI. You can create dynamic dashboards and reports that bring your data to life and offer a visual picture of your organization’s performance using Power BI’s user-friendly interface.

This is especially helpful for businesses that need to make prompt choices based on the most recent data.

Streamlined Data Extraction 

Data exporting manually from Workday into Excel may take a lot of effort and be error-prone. 

Workday data is linked with apps such as Microsoft Access and Excel using the standard ODBC interface. Follow the steps here to import Workday data into a spreadsheet and supply values to a parameterized query from cells in a spreadsheet using Microsoft Query.

If you haven’t previously, create an ODBC DSN (data source name) and define connection characteristics. This is the final step in the driver installation process. To build and configure ODBC DSNs, utilize the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator.

To connect, three pieces of information are required: authentication, the API URL, and the WSDL URL.

Authentication

Enter your User and Password to authenticate. Please keep in mind that you must separate your Tenant from your User with a ‘@’ character. For example, if your username is ‘geraldg’ and your Tenant is’mycompany_mc1′, your User should be ‘geraldg@mycompany_mc1’.

API address

The API URL can be supplied explicitly using APIURL, or it can be built using the Tenant, Service, and Host. The APIURL is constructed in the following format: <Host>/ccx/service/<Tenant>/<Service>.

To speed up this procedure, integration automates data extraction. Power BI may be configured to retrieve certain Workday data sets on a regular basis or in response to predefined triggers.

Load Data into Power BI

The process of importing data from a source, such as Workday, into Power BI for analysis is known as loading data into Power BI. To load data into Power BI, go to your Workday account and pick the tables and columns you wish to bring into Power BI. 

You may utilize Power BI’s user-friendly interface to pick and load only the information you want. This reduces the quantity of data you need to deal with and speeds up the data analysis process. Once the data has been imported, you can begin building reports and visualizations based on it. To ensure the validity and trustworthiness of your analysis, verify that the data is input correctly and appropriately.

Read, Write, and Update Workday from Excel

The Excel Add-In for Workday is the most convenient method to connect to Workday data. Users just enter their credentials into the connection process to establish a connection and may begin working with live Workday tables of data right away. The Excel Add-In is entirely self-contained; no extra software is required.

Easy-To-Use, Straightforward Configuration:

• Install the Add-In from cdata.com
• Login with User & Password
• Select Tables

When any of the Excel Add-Ins are installed, a new CData data access toolbar is created in Excel, which users may use to connect to distant data. Users can configure a connection by selecting any of the installed CData Add-Ins from the Excel toolbar.