Category: Self-Service BI

It’s been a while that I use Microsoft To Do to organise my daily tasks. From work-related tasks to buy groceries. While Microsoft To Do is super easy to use but there are some challenges in using it more efficiently, especially when you have multiple O365 accounts within different organisations. Here are some of the challenges I faced; you may face other challenges too:

• The Microsoft To Do app for Windows devices is very user friendly with amazingly good features like the ability to add multiple To Do accounts. However, we currently have to select which account we would like to use and the app shows all our tasks within that specific account. This means we can not see all our tasks from all our accounts in a single place.
• The Microsoft To Do app for iOS devices is also very handy to use, but it lacks adding multiple accounts. Hence we cannot see all our tasks from multiple O365 accounts on the app. 🙁
• We can use the Tasks within the Microsoft Outlook desktop application (I used the Windows version) which is by far the most comprehensive one with tons of features. While we can see tasks from multiple accounts in a single place, it is a real challenge if I want to know which task is assigned to which account. Besides, it is really hard to answer some questions like, how many high-priority tasks I have for today or the week ahead. I know, we can group tasks, but, it is still not so intuitive.

For the above reasons, I searched for a product that can do all the above at once. After spending some hours, I thought, well, I have to do it myself.

With that, let’s go ahead and see how we can get the job done in Power BI.

Note:

This method is not working for Microsoft To Do using personal accounts such as Outlook, Hotmail or MSN. If anyone knows how to add those, please let us know in the comments section below this post.

This is a long post that took me a reasonable amount of time to write. So I added the following table of contents so you can quickly jump to a subject of your interest.

Table of Contents

• How it Works
• Integrating Multiple To Do accounts in Power BI
  • Getting Data from the Source
  • Data Preparation
  • Revisiting the Requirements
• Data Modelling
  • Creating Date Table
    • Marking Date Table as Date
  • Creating Relationships
  • Creating Measures
    • Measures for All Tasks
    • Measures for Today’s Tasks
• Data Visualisation
  • Showing URL Links in Table Visual
  • Filtering the Data to Show Today’s Tasks Only
• Downloading the Sample File

How It Works

Microsoft Power BI is NOT a reporting tool only. We can connect to many data sources, mix and match the data, create data models and visualise the data. So it should be possible to connect to multiple To Do accounts, append the data, create a simple data model on top of that, and visualise the data to answer our questions or our customers’ questions. The Microsoft To Do data is accessible via the Microsoft Exchange Online connector available in Power BI. The rest depends on our requirements and what questions we would like to answer.

In my case, in which I am the end-user of the report, I would like to be able to know:

• Today’s tasks: All tasks that their StartDate or DueDate is today or the Tasks without any StartDate and DueDate
  • Number of tasks
  • Number of important tasks
  • Tasks by mailbox
  • Tasks details
    • Task list
    • Task description
    • Status
    • Start date
    • Due date
    • A link to the task itself that I can update if I want to
• All Tasks
  • All above plus
    • Number of open tasks
    • Number of completed tasks

You or your customer(s) might have different requirements, but once you understand how to get the To Do data from Microsoft Exchange Online and do some data explorations to find out what you are after, you’ll be good.

Continue reading “Integrating and Visualising Multiple Microsoft To Do Accounts with Power BI” →