Power BI Desktop: Update or Not?

[Anonymous]

I am working at a large organazation, and currently we are still using June 2017 version of Power BI Desktop. We are afraid that updating Power BI desktop to the latest version will cause lots of issues in creating and publishing our reports. Is it a good idea to keep Power BI desktop up to date or is it fine to use the version that we have?

[denpries · Accepted solution]

Personally, i think being too much at the front line might lead to frustrations and work in case there are bugs.

However, what you are doing now also is also not a preferred approach, imho. With this attitude you keep being afraid just like those companies that still use XP because maybe some of their critical apps break.

Sometimes you need to swallow that pill 😉 if you know what i mean.

Our big company IT department holds to a 3 month update cycle, unless i push them for a major update request.

That said, i already asked for the FEB2018 release, but it will likely take them 4 weeks to do so anyway and hopefully by then they did pick a version number that is more or less bug free.

[dani0010 · Accepted solution]

There have been life changing advances in Desktop since June 2017. I would claw my eyes out if I had to go back. At a minimum, you should at least test reports with more complex visuals and see how they do. We have lots of reports created with old versions of desktop around here, and I open and use them all the time with no issue. You're really missing out if you're not updating. Every new release is like Christmas.

[dani0010 · Accepted solution]

There have been life changing advances in Desktop since June 2017. I would claw my eyes out if I had to go back. At a minimum, you should at least test reports with more complex visuals and see how they do. We have lots of reports created with old versions of desktop around here, and I open and use them all the time with no issue. You're really missing out if you're not updating. Every new release is like Christmas.

[Fuser · Accepted solution]

Updating is not life or death. I personally keep each month's release in a folder and in the case of bugs with the latest release I uninstall and come back to the previous working one.  I think the new improvements are always worth the try.

[denpries · Accepted solution]

Personally, i think being too much at the front line might lead to frustrations and work in case there are bugs.

However, what you are doing now also is also not a preferred approach, imho. With this attitude you keep being afraid just like those companies that still use XP because maybe some of their critical apps break.

Sometimes you need to swallow that pill 😉 if you know what i mean.

Our big company IT department holds to a 3 month update cycle, unless i push them for a major update request.

That said, i already asked for the FEB2018 release, but it will likely take them 4 weeks to do so anyway and hopefully by then they did pick a version number that is more or less bug free.