Connect your BI tool to a Sortia report

Power BI, Tableau and Looker Studio, reading a Google Sheets tab

When a run finishes, Sortia writes its report to a plain tab in your spreadsheet. There is no exporter to configure and no file to shuttle, because there is nothing to export: the report is already a spreadsheet, and Power BI, Tableau and Looker Studio all read Google Sheets natively. Point your tool at the report tab once, and every later run flows into the same dashboard.

What the report tab holds

By default the report lands on a tab named Risk Analysis Report (the Output control on the panel can send it to a tab of your choice instead). It is ordinary cells: a What this says block with the run's reading in words (when you set a goal it leads with the odds of clearing it), summary statistics, the full percentile table, sensitivity rankings with the share of variance each input explains, scenario analysis of the tails, a sample of individual trials, and a footer naming the source sheet, engine, trial count and seed, so a dashboard can always say which run it is showing. A multi-output run writes every output to the same tab, computed from the same trials, so the numbers stay comparable.

Two things worth knowing before you connect:

• Hidden helper columns. The data behind the report's charts sits in hidden columns to the right of the visible tables, and it runs thousands of rows deep. Connect to the specific ranges you want, or tell your tool to skip hidden cells, and your dashboard stays clean.
• Re-runs land in place. A fresh run replaces Sortia's own earlier report tab of the same name, so your connection keeps pointing at the same tab and picks up the new numbers on its next refresh. A tab you have edited by hand is never replaced. Set a seed on the panel if you want two refreshes of the dashboard to agree to the last digit.

Power BI

1. Copy your spreadsheet's URL from the browser address bar.
2. In Power BI Desktop, choose Get data, then Google Sheets, and paste the URL.
3. Sign in with the Google account that can open the spreadsheet.
4. In the Navigator, tick the report tab and load it. Refresh the dataset after each run to pull the new numbers.

Tableau

1. In the Connect pane, choose Google Drive under To a Server (older versions ship a Google Sheets connector instead; both work the same way here).
2. Sign in and pick the spreadsheet.
3. Drag the report tab out as the sheet to analyze. Refresh the data source after each run.

Looker Studio

1. Choose Create, then Data source, then the Google Sheets connector.
2. Pick the spreadsheet and the report worksheet. Untick Include hidden and filtered cells so the chart helper columns stay out, or point the source at a specific range.
3. Connect. Looker Studio re-reads the sheet on its own refresh cadence, and you can refresh a report by hand any time.

Other ways the numbers travel

• A link. The report is part of your spreadsheet, so sharing it is Google Sheets sharing: one URL, with your document's own permissions.
• A file. File, then Download in Google Sheets covers Excel and PDF with nothing extra installed.
• A picture or the raw numbers. Any Sortia chart opens full size, exports as a composed PNG, and offers its numbers as copyable rows for pasting into anything else.
• A SIPmath library. For another tool that works in trials rather than a dashboard, a Risk run, a Monte Carlo panel output, a schedule's finish trials or a fitted distribution can be saved as a SIPmath 3.0 library, the open standard from probabilitymanagement.org for passing uncertain quantities between tools. A Risk run saves every output, or the model's whole input set with its correlation matrix, and Risk Analysis reads such a file back as inputs. See Support for what is read and what is skipped.

Questions, or a BI tool we should add a recipe for? Email support@sortia.io.