Modifying GANTT Charts inside Power BI

Power BI continues to Shock and Awe us all, month after month. In the December release of Power BI Desktop, I saw the GANTT chart and we had a use case to update task dates and descriptions on project plans for a client.

After coming to America 3 years ago and learning DAX through Power Pivot Pro’s excellent intro to Tabular models, I met the founder of Power ON, Per Solli in Los Angeles in 2017. Power ON’s toolkit opens up completely new opportunity with their Power BI Write-Back Features, and their custom visuals. It is awesome, you should try it. Power On’s Toolkit is it what enabled the write-back in this blog post.

Our client wanted the ability to plan over time, and a GANTT Chart is an excellent way to visualize tasks, add additional data and filter Power BI reports. The only problem, is that Power BI is READ-ONLY. However, Power ON’s technology makes ANYTHING WRITE-BACK.

After a couple of hours, I could store the data in a SQL Server and/or Tabular Server, and make the visual update dynamically.

In Power BI now turns into a powerful planning tool:

In this case we expanded ‘Prototyping’ with one month.

The GANTT Chart Wizard is courtesy of xViz. You can find more info on this site about the write-back technologies.

Cosmin Unguru is a Subject Matter Expert at Power ON and frequent contributor to our support forums.

Contact me on how to enable more write-back scenarios. BI is now a 2-Way Street.