Creating dashboards with tools like PowerBI with ManageBac+ data allows schools to generate reports that can be shared across the community. It is a powerful way to build insights.
It is possible to connect the ManageBac+ data to PowerBi in many different ways, but some community members have found success with the following combination of technologies:
- In an on-premise installation of Windows, install Docker including the linux subsystem
- Install MBPY into the docker instance
- Import the data with MBPY with the `mbpy import` commands
- Allow a direct database connection by installing SQLite ODBC driver for Windows
- Connect PowerBI to the database using the ODBC connection
In other words:
- The data from ManageBac+ needs to be extracted from the API, which MBPY is able to do
- It stores it into tables, for example a "student" table and a "classes" and "term_grades" tables
- PowerBI needs to be able to connect to those tables, in order to build further queries
- These further queries relies on SQL and database mechanism to produce insights, such as pivot tables, charts, etc