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