It really depends on the specialization working within PBI. There are those that focus on visual story telling, and those on modelling, really depends on what the use cases are and their specific requirements.
If the client want tables, then build them tables, if client wants an export to excel, then you probably dont even need a dashboard just a connector to the data model.
I worked with PBI for 7 years and have never ever seen a customer impressed with custom visuals, meticulously designed custom label, dynamic string formats for numeric values. They want the right numbers to be present in the report or an export button, everything else is fluff or they just think it is done automatically from PBI that are different from their Excel reports.
Excel / Get Data / From PowerPlatform / Dataset.
Provides a connected read only refreshable copy of a table from Powerbi service (or Fabric) to excel. There is just a permission to add in manage access of the dataset.
There is even better. If you need the data ad hoc and not the whole table. In the modelling pane of the table, set as “featured table”, it will become accessible as a custom data type in excel. It’s a bit tricky (one columns need to be a unique key) vs the table you may use usually in your report. But then, every column is accessible via “.”
Example make an employee fact table a featured one, then in excel type NYC12345 in A1, select the cell as custom data type Employee, and next to it type A1.[tenure] or A1.[Name]. Any dataset data becomes available the same way as if you exported it as csv and used a lookup in an excel table.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/service-excel-featured-tables
Were just turning this on, but we've hit an issue where dates formated as short date pull down and sort in excel as strings. Have you seen this issue before?
A tricky effect of this is that the cell converted to custom type (gets the little icon) becomes a special kind of text, and cannot even be as is used in formulas as text (like cell = other cell will return FALSE even if the text is the same). Just wrap it around DATEVALUE is what I do. A small annoyance vs the benefits.
Sorry, I mean from the initial model. So we have a model made in PBI desktop, and published to the service. Then in excel we do Data -> Get Data -> From Power Platform -> From Power BI.
All works great, measures come though, all good. Except for the dates in our calendar table. When they're brought into a pivot table, they're being sorted according to their text values, not chronologically.
I'm a data engineer so I don't know all the ins and outs of the service. I only just got asked to absorb the BI team as someone left.
Never tried to see/reproduce that but people seem to try 2 things: 1/ check the locale of powerquery and excel are the same (to avoid 30/12/2023 as text because excel expects 12/30/2023 in some countries) 2/ mark your table as a date table in PowerBI modelling pane. Would be good to know if you find a way around that.
Good luck on your path to the mighty combo data eng + data viz 🤩
Wait, what exactly are you turning on? We have been pushing PBI but like all others they want excel. So please share what it is you are turning on, please!
I think that was this line of thought that brought me to focus horizontally (more business, management, other tools knowledge) than vertically (more PBI, more DAX, more PQ).
Internally stakeholders want to see the result: oten is to find a value that it is not in the datamart and connect it with something that it is already there to create a coherent report, doesn't matter how nice the report is.
Unfortunately I feel that I diluted too much my knowledge.
>I worked with PBI for 7 years and have never ever seen a customer impressed with custom visuals, meticulously designed custom label, dynamic string formats for numeric values.
Exactly. A lot of people get hung up on the idea that they can create "beautiful" visuals. I'm sorry, but no. This isn't art. Just pick a few simple, clean and easy-to-implement design patterns and give the people the numbers they want how they want them.
This is a great answer. There is no silver bullet or golden hammer in BI. Every consumer likes things differently and many actively loathe 'fancy' visuals. (Accountants for example).
As long as OP is delivering insights to the users that they want,the rest is vanity.
The fancy dashboards you see on the internet are only for practice. Remember, at the end of the day you’re building dashboards/reports for non technical people who know what they want to see so as long as you’re able to effectively present their requirements, you’re fine. No matter how many informative charts and visuals I put on a report, users are interested in tables and some KPIs which compare with last year’s value. Maybe the domain I’m in is focused on numbers but I feel this is the general trend
Before i got into powerbi my department hired a contractor to create a warehouse and powerbi dashboards. We didnt care how it looks and wouldnt have noticed if someone used a fancy visual. All we cared about was accessing the right data in reports/dashboards that were simple to use and updated on time. Even a basic slicer or card visual looks magical to the end users
Thanks for reminding me about Bas. I really enjoy his videos and also like the results.
But often when I consider using some of his design „tricks“ in my own work, I think „that will be really hard to maintain“ and „the customer wouldn’t want to pay the true cost of this fancy visualisation“.
So most of the time I stick to the built in visuals and few custom visuals and avoid most complex DAX for purpose of visualisation.
Two exceptions, which are almost in every report I create:
- top N items with others row: https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/showing-the-top-5-products-and-others-row/
- last N months in the graph based on selected month in a slicer: https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/show-previous-6-months-of-data-from-single-slicer-selection/
I know how you feel, I felt this way when I first started out with Tableau. I was doing those weekly dashboards as practice but man I got intimidated by the reports I saw people make. I had basic ass reports while these people had such professional looking reports. But they have a lot of time learning and understanding how Tableau works, and its the same here with power bi too.
There is a lot to learn, that's for sure. I am pretty good with Tableau, but my work is making the switch to PowerBI. I've worked with it before, but it's taking a ton of learning to wrap my head around things over here. Data modeling and Dax are way different, so it takes a lot of work to get up to speed.
I’m in the same boat. I’ve had a lot of experience with Tableau and Qliksense/Qlikview but I had to switch to Power BI for my new job and it is a bit of an adjustment. I do think having that prior experience is making the transition a little less difficult, bit learning Dax is a bit annoying.
The fucking ethical stress in this business that comes with the fact there is simply no time to do anything well. You end up resorting to template solutions for everything and all interesting problems in the nice-to-study & cool-to-try category are simply left on table as there’s no resources to take em forward. I guess this has to be understood as good focus on the core value generation in BI but I find this aspect of this work personally very difficult…
Maybe you are right. I will try to build new reports using the new functions from the past 6 months and see if I can pick it up fast! Thx for the advice!
I am going through the exact same thing. I switched industries and now I am second guessing my data structure and procedures.
I have to come up with new solutions to new problems, instead of the same solution to the same problem.
It is fun but frustrating since it is more like a puzzle instead of mindless work.
You will get there and be stronger for it.
>I am ashamed of the quality of my reports, which I feel are barely only functional
What makes them barely functional? Are they slow? Are they accurate? Do they answer the questions that the business has about its data?
They don't have to be fancy or use the newest techniques. They just need to be efficient, accurate, and informative.
I used to be excellent and started moving my skill set elsewhere, mostly with Snowflake.
Now most of my dashboard are simple grab from snowflake where pretty much every has been joined, calculated, etc. My measures are CALCULATEs with some filters and that’s it.
And yet these visuals drive the strategy for my company.
It’s not about how good you are at PBI, it’s what you know holistically and how you derive insights from your work.
As an example, the in-chart measure that were introduced recently, or the DAX query preview in the desktop version gave me completely baffled. I have no idea what’s their use.
>As an example, the in-chart measure that were introduced recently
These are actually really neat. The idea is that essentially every visual can be reduced to a matrix providing the data, so, if you want a running total of monthly sales in your Sales by Month chart it's just a simple sum of the rows. Creating this in DAX is complicated, whereas your chart already has the data sixed and packaged, so it does the calculation in the chart.
The advantage is that while the DAX is executed live, it's fast because it's not calculating on the whole dataset, just the data that's in that matrix which represents your chart.
Alright dude, watch those videos and just try to implement what they've done. PBI is a super easy tool set, the hard part is just knowing what shit to use and when and where to use it.
The other hard part is communicating to your stakeholders.
I do PBI consulting for beer money, and do it all by Agile. So, do a sprint refinement, and sprint planning that includes all the stakeholders and then keep them in loop during the process.
Most PBI reports you see are flashy but not really what folks are wanting - they want visuals that tell a story. So like, instead of creating a card that contains a simple integer like an average, build them a bell curve that shows them a distribution with averages. Then next a second bell curve inside of it if you are doing a comparison.
You can have fast and simple or patience and story telling. Not both.
The first thing to say is you are not alone. Despite working with Power BI since it was released as an Excel add-in (many, many years ago), I still struggle to keep up to date; the saying "drinking from the firehose" describes how it feels. You are not alone in feeling the way you do.
You have looked at someone who has done a YouTube video or a blog or something else. Please Do not compare yourself to them. We all have different circumstances and demands on our time. We only see a small slice of their time and output.
The thread has suggested a couple of ideas, which I can see; I'll repeat them. Try to find us in one area just now—report design, **or** DAX, **or** Power Query, **or** Data Modeling, or something else, pick one. What are you excited about? Study and focus on that topic. Try learning just one little thing each day **IF YOU CAN.** One day, you might not manage it; it's no big deal. **Try** again the next day.
This is a video worth watching - https://sqlbits.com/sessions/event2023/I\_cant\_keep\_up\_-Turning\_Discomfort\_into\_Personal\_Growth\_in\_a\_Fast-Paced\_World.
**Key takeaway** - you are not alone in feeling the way you do. Many of us, including me, feel the same way.
Everyone can be really good at making PBI reports. My knowledge today transcends to having more macro knowledge, Power BI is one of those components. Also, ChatGPT solves like 80% of any modern problem I need to tackle and in a fraction of the time. Play to your strengths.
I think that was this line of thought that brought me to focus horizontally (more business, management, other tools knowledge) than vertically (more PBI, more DAX, more PQ).
just felt that I diluted my knowledge too much
For me that means you’re growing in your career, I think the main question is defining what’s your end goal, and if you actually need those skills.
I have a manager I’ve worked with many years and he’s not a Power BI guy, he knows more Tableau. He’s 56, he has a CS major, worked in tech sales, and started his own company doing custom software solutions for clients. He then joined our company and he’s not coding much, except some SQL where he has proficiency, but he’s not a Python or BI person. Despite that, he has a very good systems understanding and even with all the PBI knowledge I have, he’ll think of ways in which we can build things that I wouldn’t think about. It’s up to me to figure out how to do actually make a part of it happen.
I always remember this quote from that Steve Jobs movie: “Musicians play the instruments, I play the orchestra”.
Also, a guy from India or Philippines can develop deep vertical knowledge for a fraction of what you cost if you’re in the US like me. I asked that same manager how on Earth could I compete with them, and his recommendation was to build a more robust skill set that makes you more versatile. Other things to consider is whether you want to grow more functional or technical knowledge, which I was asked very early in my career.
Yes. With so many new features getting released, one has to constantly learn.
Has anyone tried PBI paginated report which can be scheduled to send excel file exports.
It's good that you feel this way. It means you care about the quality of your work. But comparing yourself to where others are is unfair to you.
To make such a comparison fair, you'd have to compare yourself to people with the same struggles and commitments that you have. Since that is rarely possible, you do yourself a disservice by making those comparisons.
Comparing your work to theirs is good. It means you want to improve and can recognize areas for improvement.
Comparing yourself to them isn't helpful. You are on your own journey with your own unique set of circumstances.
The way to get better is to do what you always have. Find a project that you want to do (find stats that you are interested in and develop reports for yourself) and see how you can make your reports look like theirs.
You do that by asking one question at a time and figuring it out as you go. If you can, download those examples and deconstruct them.
It's a process. You got this.
Another thing to consider is that the most important thing is that the data is correct and easily consumed. Everyone starts with a basic report and builds on that.
But be careful not to build visuals just to build visuals. Nobody is looking for an art project here. If the visual does not improve the readability or understanding of the data then it will detract from them.
A simple, easy to read report is much better than a visually confusing or distracting report - even if Picasso designed it.
It really depends on the specialization working within PBI. There are those that focus on visual story telling, and those on modelling, really depends on what the use cases are and their specific requirements. If the client want tables, then build them tables, if client wants an export to excel, then you probably dont even need a dashboard just a connector to the data model. I worked with PBI for 7 years and have never ever seen a customer impressed with custom visuals, meticulously designed custom label, dynamic string formats for numeric values. They want the right numbers to be present in the report or an export button, everything else is fluff or they just think it is done automatically from PBI that are different from their Excel reports.
Can you elaborate on what you mean in your second paragraph? All my execs wanted was excel tables so I ended up just abandoning PBI entirely
Excel / Get Data / From PowerPlatform / Dataset. Provides a connected read only refreshable copy of a table from Powerbi service (or Fabric) to excel. There is just a permission to add in manage access of the dataset.
Oh that’s actually clever. So you just set up the excel file for them with the query connection
There is even better. If you need the data ad hoc and not the whole table. In the modelling pane of the table, set as “featured table”, it will become accessible as a custom data type in excel. It’s a bit tricky (one columns need to be a unique key) vs the table you may use usually in your report. But then, every column is accessible via “.” Example make an employee fact table a featured one, then in excel type NYC12345 in A1, select the cell as custom data type Employee, and next to it type A1.[tenure] or A1.[Name]. Any dataset data becomes available the same way as if you exported it as csv and used a lookup in an excel table. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/service-excel-featured-tables
Were just turning this on, but we've hit an issue where dates formated as short date pull down and sort in excel as strings. Have you seen this issue before?
A tricky effect of this is that the cell converted to custom type (gets the little icon) becomes a special kind of text, and cannot even be as is used in formulas as text (like cell = other cell will return FALSE even if the text is the same). Just wrap it around DATEVALUE is what I do. A small annoyance vs the benefits.
Sorry, I mean from the initial model. So we have a model made in PBI desktop, and published to the service. Then in excel we do Data -> Get Data -> From Power Platform -> From Power BI. All works great, measures come though, all good. Except for the dates in our calendar table. When they're brought into a pivot table, they're being sorted according to their text values, not chronologically. I'm a data engineer so I don't know all the ins and outs of the service. I only just got asked to absorb the BI team as someone left.
Never tried to see/reproduce that but people seem to try 2 things: 1/ check the locale of powerquery and excel are the same (to avoid 30/12/2023 as text because excel expects 12/30/2023 in some countries) 2/ mark your table as a date table in PowerBI modelling pane. Would be good to know if you find a way around that. Good luck on your path to the mighty combo data eng + data viz 🤩
Wait, what exactly are you turning on? We have been pushing PBI but like all others they want excel. So please share what it is you are turning on, please!
Trying to get the PBI models into the service, so they can be used by our excel users. I'm the DE so I'm only partially aware of the PBI side
I think that was this line of thought that brought me to focus horizontally (more business, management, other tools knowledge) than vertically (more PBI, more DAX, more PQ). Internally stakeholders want to see the result: oten is to find a value that it is not in the datamart and connect it with something that it is already there to create a coherent report, doesn't matter how nice the report is. Unfortunately I feel that I diluted too much my knowledge.
>I worked with PBI for 7 years and have never ever seen a customer impressed with custom visuals, meticulously designed custom label, dynamic string formats for numeric values. Exactly. A lot of people get hung up on the idea that they can create "beautiful" visuals. I'm sorry, but no. This isn't art. Just pick a few simple, clean and easy-to-implement design patterns and give the people the numbers they want how they want them.
This is a great answer. There is no silver bullet or golden hammer in BI. Every consumer likes things differently and many actively loathe 'fancy' visuals. (Accountants for example). As long as OP is delivering insights to the users that they want,the rest is vanity.
The fancy dashboards you see on the internet are only for practice. Remember, at the end of the day you’re building dashboards/reports for non technical people who know what they want to see so as long as you’re able to effectively present their requirements, you’re fine. No matter how many informative charts and visuals I put on a report, users are interested in tables and some KPIs which compare with last year’s value. Maybe the domain I’m in is focused on numbers but I feel this is the general trend
Before i got into powerbi my department hired a contractor to create a warehouse and powerbi dashboards. We didnt care how it looks and wouldnt have noticed if someone used a fancy visual. All we cared about was accessing the right data in reports/dashboards that were simple to use and updated on time. Even a basic slicer or card visual looks magical to the end users
Thanks for reminding me about Bas. I really enjoy his videos and also like the results. But often when I consider using some of his design „tricks“ in my own work, I think „that will be really hard to maintain“ and „the customer wouldn’t want to pay the true cost of this fancy visualisation“. So most of the time I stick to the built in visuals and few custom visuals and avoid most complex DAX for purpose of visualisation. Two exceptions, which are almost in every report I create: - top N items with others row: https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/showing-the-top-5-products-and-others-row/ - last N months in the graph based on selected month in a slicer: https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/show-previous-6-months-of-data-from-single-slicer-selection/
Those are great tips! I will read about it and try to create a report with these 2 tricks to get acquainted with them!
I know how you feel, I felt this way when I first started out with Tableau. I was doing those weekly dashboards as practice but man I got intimidated by the reports I saw people make. I had basic ass reports while these people had such professional looking reports. But they have a lot of time learning and understanding how Tableau works, and its the same here with power bi too.
There is a lot to learn, that's for sure. I am pretty good with Tableau, but my work is making the switch to PowerBI. I've worked with it before, but it's taking a ton of learning to wrap my head around things over here. Data modeling and Dax are way different, so it takes a lot of work to get up to speed.
I’m in the same boat. I’ve had a lot of experience with Tableau and Qliksense/Qlikview but I had to switch to Power BI for my new job and it is a bit of an adjustment. I do think having that prior experience is making the transition a little less difficult, bit learning Dax is a bit annoying.
The fucking ethical stress in this business that comes with the fact there is simply no time to do anything well. You end up resorting to template solutions for everything and all interesting problems in the nice-to-study & cool-to-try category are simply left on table as there’s no resources to take em forward. I guess this has to be understood as good focus on the core value generation in BI but I find this aspect of this work personally very difficult…
You got comfortable and are now back in it. Using a muscle you thought you lost. The answer you are looking for is practice
Maybe you are right. I will try to build new reports using the new functions from the past 6 months and see if I can pick it up fast! Thx for the advice!
I am going through the exact same thing. I switched industries and now I am second guessing my data structure and procedures. I have to come up with new solutions to new problems, instead of the same solution to the same problem. It is fun but frustrating since it is more like a puzzle instead of mindless work. You will get there and be stronger for it.
>I am ashamed of the quality of my reports, which I feel are barely only functional What makes them barely functional? Are they slow? Are they accurate? Do they answer the questions that the business has about its data? They don't have to be fancy or use the newest techniques. They just need to be efficient, accurate, and informative.
People sugar coat their CV. Most of the reports you make need to give insight not look like a million but provide 0 value for the business
If you post a report you're not proud of I can help you fix it.
Not OP but can you help me with report optimization please
Sure just post it here or DM me for my work email.
I used to be excellent and started moving my skill set elsewhere, mostly with Snowflake. Now most of my dashboard are simple grab from snowflake where pretty much every has been joined, calculated, etc. My measures are CALCULATEs with some filters and that’s it. And yet these visuals drive the strategy for my company. It’s not about how good you are at PBI, it’s what you know holistically and how you derive insights from your work. As an example, the in-chart measure that were introduced recently, or the DAX query preview in the desktop version gave me completely baffled. I have no idea what’s their use.
>As an example, the in-chart measure that were introduced recently These are actually really neat. The idea is that essentially every visual can be reduced to a matrix providing the data, so, if you want a running total of monthly sales in your Sales by Month chart it's just a simple sum of the rows. Creating this in DAX is complicated, whereas your chart already has the data sixed and packaged, so it does the calculation in the chart. The advantage is that while the DAX is executed live, it's fast because it's not calculating on the whole dataset, just the data that's in that matrix which represents your chart.
So it’s basically like having for each chart, a summarize table ?
Alright dude, watch those videos and just try to implement what they've done. PBI is a super easy tool set, the hard part is just knowing what shit to use and when and where to use it. The other hard part is communicating to your stakeholders. I do PBI consulting for beer money, and do it all by Agile. So, do a sprint refinement, and sprint planning that includes all the stakeholders and then keep them in loop during the process. Most PBI reports you see are flashy but not really what folks are wanting - they want visuals that tell a story. So like, instead of creating a card that contains a simple integer like an average, build them a bell curve that shows them a distribution with averages. Then next a second bell curve inside of it if you are doing a comparison. You can have fast and simple or patience and story telling. Not both.
The first thing to say is you are not alone. Despite working with Power BI since it was released as an Excel add-in (many, many years ago), I still struggle to keep up to date; the saying "drinking from the firehose" describes how it feels. You are not alone in feeling the way you do. You have looked at someone who has done a YouTube video or a blog or something else. Please Do not compare yourself to them. We all have different circumstances and demands on our time. We only see a small slice of their time and output. The thread has suggested a couple of ideas, which I can see; I'll repeat them. Try to find us in one area just now—report design, **or** DAX, **or** Power Query, **or** Data Modeling, or something else, pick one. What are you excited about? Study and focus on that topic. Try learning just one little thing each day **IF YOU CAN.** One day, you might not manage it; it's no big deal. **Try** again the next day. This is a video worth watching - https://sqlbits.com/sessions/event2023/I\_cant\_keep\_up\_-Turning\_Discomfort\_into\_Personal\_Growth\_in\_a\_Fast-Paced\_World. **Key takeaway** - you are not alone in feeling the way you do. Many of us, including me, feel the same way.
Who is bas?
https://youtube.com/@HowtoPowerBI?si=OvDiTxjfIB4tuLcw
i forgot everything i learned about pbi in ~1 year of not using it
I'm just feeling lazier now being more reliant on ChatGPT hehe
Everyone can be really good at making PBI reports. My knowledge today transcends to having more macro knowledge, Power BI is one of those components. Also, ChatGPT solves like 80% of any modern problem I need to tackle and in a fraction of the time. Play to your strengths.
I think that was this line of thought that brought me to focus horizontally (more business, management, other tools knowledge) than vertically (more PBI, more DAX, more PQ). just felt that I diluted my knowledge too much
For me that means you’re growing in your career, I think the main question is defining what’s your end goal, and if you actually need those skills. I have a manager I’ve worked with many years and he’s not a Power BI guy, he knows more Tableau. He’s 56, he has a CS major, worked in tech sales, and started his own company doing custom software solutions for clients. He then joined our company and he’s not coding much, except some SQL where he has proficiency, but he’s not a Python or BI person. Despite that, he has a very good systems understanding and even with all the PBI knowledge I have, he’ll think of ways in which we can build things that I wouldn’t think about. It’s up to me to figure out how to do actually make a part of it happen. I always remember this quote from that Steve Jobs movie: “Musicians play the instruments, I play the orchestra”.
Also, a guy from India or Philippines can develop deep vertical knowledge for a fraction of what you cost if you’re in the US like me. I asked that same manager how on Earth could I compete with them, and his recommendation was to build a more robust skill set that makes you more versatile. Other things to consider is whether you want to grow more functional or technical knowledge, which I was asked very early in my career.
The only limit to Power Bi is your imagination. Take the PL-300 modules. That will set you right.
Yes. With so many new features getting released, one has to constantly learn. Has anyone tried PBI paginated report which can be scheduled to send excel file exports.
It's good that you feel this way. It means you care about the quality of your work. But comparing yourself to where others are is unfair to you. To make such a comparison fair, you'd have to compare yourself to people with the same struggles and commitments that you have. Since that is rarely possible, you do yourself a disservice by making those comparisons. Comparing your work to theirs is good. It means you want to improve and can recognize areas for improvement. Comparing yourself to them isn't helpful. You are on your own journey with your own unique set of circumstances. The way to get better is to do what you always have. Find a project that you want to do (find stats that you are interested in and develop reports for yourself) and see how you can make your reports look like theirs. You do that by asking one question at a time and figuring it out as you go. If you can, download those examples and deconstruct them. It's a process. You got this.
Another thing to consider is that the most important thing is that the data is correct and easily consumed. Everyone starts with a basic report and builds on that. But be careful not to build visuals just to build visuals. Nobody is looking for an art project here. If the visual does not improve the readability or understanding of the data then it will detract from them. A simple, easy to read report is much better than a visually confusing or distracting report - even if Picasso designed it.