Disadvantages and Limitations of Power BI

[Narasimha]

Hello All,

what are the Disadvantages and Limitations of Power BI. I know below some.

Power BI max workbook size is 250 MB only.
Not able to change data source type in Power BI report
Not able to disable a report once enabled in Power BI
Not able to cancel a scheduled data refresh

Please let me know other disadvantages.

[gregers1972]

The size of data is quite a limitation and how clean the data has to be prior to BI and DAX is quite tricky for complex data and modification across specific values in rows and columns.

The speed is not good for large amounts for data and the mix of PQ and DAX is a bit confusion.

[adelheni]

Power Bi is a very powerful tool but like any other, it has its issues and limitations

Here is some of them

1. Provides AutoML only in Power BI DataFlows. This means you cannot do AutoML in Power BI Desktop. More importantly, it also means you cannot do AutoML after the data model is built.

2. Advanced location intelligence is still not available.

3. No graph analytics yet.

4. DAX is very rigid and has a steep learning curve to master it to address any complex scenarios. In fact, PowerQuery & M is the most powerful tool in Power BI, whereas DAX and the data model is a hindrance of equal weight to Power BI.

It's time now for Microsoft to rethink the strategy and do something like

1. Make data flows available in Power BI Desktop.

2. Make Data Model & DAX optional.

3. Enhance Location intelligence aka Spatial Analytics, including 3D-Maps from Excel

4. Introduce Social or Graph intelligence aka Graph Analytics. That's when it becomes a true self-service business intelligence platform.

[BK]

I agree to the point that data model and DAX though being a powerful one but still a hindrance to speed of analytics. Also, though I like the Power Query and M and Power Pivot and DAX, I still don't see a strong justification for creation of two more languages to deal with analytics when you already have a much established and a robust SQL language. Not really sure what happened to the Microsoft's acquisition of Metanautix which was doing what Power Query and Power Pivot put together does but using SQL.
To some extent this is evident in the form of the concept of lakehouse in Azure Synapse Analytics.

[BK]

1. Provides AutoML only in Power BI DataFlows. This means you cannot do AutoML in Power BI Desktop. More importantly, it also means you cannot do AutoML after the data model is built.

2. Advanced location intelligence is still not available.

3. No graph analytics yet.

4. DAX is very rigid and has steep learning curve to master it to address any complex scenarios. In fact, PowerQuery & M is the most powerful tool in Power BI, whereas DAX and the data model is a hindrance of equal weight to Power BI.

It's time now for Microsoft to rethink the strategy and do something like

1. Make data flows available in Power BI Desktop.

2. Make Data Model & DAX as optional.

3. Enhance Location intelligence aka Spatial Analytics, including 3D-Maps from Excel

4. Introduce Social or Graph intelligence aka Graph Analytics. That's when it becomes a true self-service business intelligence platform.

[BK]

I agree to the point that data model and DAX though being a powerful one but still a hindrance to speed of analytics. Also, though I like the Power Query and M and Power Pivot and DAX, I still don't see a strong justification for creation of two more languages to deal with analytics when you already have a much established and a robust SQL language. Not really sure what happened to the Microsoft's acquisition of Metanautix which was doing what Power Query and Power Pivot put together does but using SQL.
To some extent this is evident in the form of the concept of lakehouse in Azure Synapse Analytics.

[v-piga-msft]

Hi @Narasimha,

---

what are the Disadvantages and Limitations of Power BI. I know below some.

Power BI max workbook size is 250 MB only.
Not able to change data source type in Power BI report
Not able to disable a report once enabled in Power BI
Not able to cancel a scheduled data refresh

Please let me know other disadvantages.

Firstly, There is a 1 GB limit, per dataset, that is imported into Power BI. If you have chosen to keep the Excel experience, instead of importing the data, you will be limited to 250 MB for the dataset.

Secondly, we could change the data source type in Power BI. You could have a view of this article.

For the third, I'm a little confused about your requirement, could you describe in more details, so that we can help further investigate on it?

Besides, we could cancel the scheduled data refresh. You could set it under Settings——Dataset ——select the dataset you want to cancel scheduled refresh. You could set the Keep your data up to date slider to No and Apply.

In addition, what limitations do you want to know about Power BI, Direct Query or the visuals and so on? 

Best Regards,

Cherry