Power BI musings of a new user

[GSavage]

I have just joined the Community, having spent some time exploring Power BI.

The company I work for runs Dynamics AX 2009 with migration to 365 planned. We currently utilise SSRS and SSAS where PowerPivot is used as a front-end.

Although there are many things I like about Power BI, there are lots I don’t like about the user experience amongst which:

• Selections not reflected in slicers
• Difficult to identify when/what filters are active (although there is a partial workaround of a measure to display a Count() Vs Countrows(All) in a card)
• No global ‘clear all selections’ (although there is a workaround using a bookmark tied to a ‘reset’ image)
• No visualisation ‘hover over’ help text
• Can’t condition visualisation show/hide to create a context based report
• Can’t set an on-open default value (such as current month)

Some of the above exist in ‘ideas’ but looking at the top 5 they have been outstanding a long time:

1 June 2016

2 November 2014

3 September 2015

4 July 2015

5 August 2015

I can see an enormous amount of development has gone into Power BI (and continues) but there really needs to be a focus on getting some of the fundamental issues resolved.

The positioning of Power BI confuses me somewhat – what benefits are there over Power Pivot? I often feel frustrated by Microsoft where there are lots of different technologies involved (and learned/churned) and more than one solution. I only want one – and it should be the best of breed

Power BI is in my humble opinion a long way off the likes of Qlikview in terms of the UI and functionality (ignoring licencing and other capital costs). But maybe with Dynamics 365 and Entity store (SSAS obsoleted?) and the opportunities for integration, then Power BI does make sense.

All that said, I hope to become a regular in the Community!

[mbenjamin]

Thanks so much for your feedback, and welcome to the Community!

I hope we continue to see you around in some of the lively discussions currently going on. 

Let me know if you have any questions about the Community!

-Mariana

Community Manager