Constant crashes, hangs, file corruption

[dharland]

The current version of PBI Desktop is practically unusable. It crashes and hangs randomly - pages are missing after saving and reopening. DAYS of work are gone!!! And forget about using CDS data - the data transfer is so SLOW that it takes HOURS for the data to refresh sometimes.

And to make things worse, some mental giant decided to store the debug.log files in the same directory as the .pbix file - so if .pbix files are in a directory that is synched with One Drive, NONE of the One Drive files can be synched while the .pbix file is open.                                                    

We are starting to look for another BI platform to replace PBI because of the lack of QA (and we are a MS partner).

[v-rzhou-msft]

Hi @dharland

I am sorry for your bad experience in PBI Desktop.

Now you may meet these problems:

1. PBI Desktop crashes and hangs randomly - pages are missing after saving and reopening.

2. The data transfer is so SLOW that it takes HOURS for the data to refresh in Desktop sometimes.

3. NONE of the One Drive files can be synched while the pbix file is open.

Here I have some advice:

1. Please check your version, the latest version is 2.84.861.0 (2020/8/24).

    You can download the latest version by this link: Download

2. You may refer to links as below to optmize your data model to get a better performance. 

    Blog :  Data Refresh takes a very long time

               Optimization guide for Power BI

3. You may give the feedback under the latest update blog and we will update PBI Desktop to give you better experience. 

    Blog:   Power BI Desktop August 2020 Feature Summary

Best Regards, 

Rico Zhou 

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.  

[Greg_Deckler]

@dharland - Hmm, I am not having these issues. I am on 

2.84.661.0 64-bit (August 2020)

Is this the version you are running? Are you running from Store or Download? 

That said I have heard of some possible issues with August release but mostly rumors. It's been a while since the team had a truly broken monthly release.

You could check the Issues forum here:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/idb-p/Issues

And if it is not there, then you could post it.

If you have Pro account you could try to open a support ticket. If you have a Pro account it is free. Go to https://support.powerbi.com. Scroll down and click "CREATE SUPPORT TICKET".