No hierarchies when connected to SSAS Tabular

[HarrisMalik]

HI

In the new report canvas I do not see SSAS hierarchies anymore.

We have a date dimension having calendar year, month, date hierarchy with all the other attributes hidden. In Power BI it only shows the name of the date dimension nothing under it. Will it be available in GA?

Regards

Harris

[danwilkins]

Hi,

MS - Any update on likely timescales for inclusion of hierarchy and drill-down support? I'm keen deploying this but these are big drawbacks at the moment.

Thanks,

Dan

[SnoJa10]

Unfortunately I am in the same place with my company.

It's now been a month since we lost drill-downs (despite having it available before and during the preview). I've been pushing Power BI to my leaders for a while but unfortunately this has now caused them to change their mind. They have simply lost trust in the fact these sorts of changes can be done with no communication or back up plan.

Now I need to go and learn QlikView (which i'm not a huge fan of).

[Anonymous]

Is there any update on this?  I just hit this roadblock in my POC, and am a little alarmed that this has not been discussed in over a month. 

[andre]

Whatever has been released thus far is most likely what will be available at GA plus the Power BI Desktop. So no hierarchies in the short term.

[CyrusOC]

I too am at a loss to understand how such a fundamental thing like hierarchies wasn't included day one. 

[andre]

Well, my guess is that the development team had to make some tradeoffs in order to meet the GA date and it was one of them.  I am confident that with the focus that Microsoft has on making Power BI the leading BI tool, we will see most of our gripes addressed relatively soon.

[CyrusOC]

Not a good tradeoff. The current web report build seems to want to summarize my date column for year.  If I had my hierarchies, it would be really simple.   This is not going well at the moment, I cannot build any useful reports in the web browser.

[andre]

You can still use Excel to build your visuals and publish them to PowerBI.com  if you need any features that are still not present in the Service.  Hopefully, only for a short while...

[CyrusOC]

That is not the point...I want to use what I previously could do yesterday.  I have wasted a whole morning on things that should have worked.  I want to use direct connections with live data to a web based tool...using Excel is going backwards. If Excel is the answer, then why bother with this at all?

[andre]

There are currently several features that are only available in Excel with respect to visualizations and Excel will always be a first grade citizen when it comes to Microsoft BI, so I would not be ruling it out of equation completely.

There will be some frustration for a short while with having features disparity between different tools in the stack and this frustration is well justified. However, Power BI is in Preview right now (even if it’s just for a few more days) and even after that, we’ll have 60 days of free trial for Pro. So essentially we are getting a lot of value without having to pay much for it. If the product is still missing some key features for you, you should probably just wait until it becomes more mature. However, I suspect that for a great number of people (and I happen to be one of them), the product has a ton of very useful features today which more than justifies having to deal with some frustration for a short while longer.

[CyrusOC]

The problem is you are giving a "trial" of a version of Power BI that isn't "Pro".  I wouldn't call this release "Pro" as Drill downs, hierarchies and groups using SSAS Tabular sources all don't work.  In my opinion you are really only giving out a free trial of the "free" version.

[HarrisMalik]

Well this is very frustrating. Before the hierarchies were shown as attributes so we can still use them but now they are completely gone which made it impossible for us to use the tool. It is same with the drill down reports which are not working with new report canvas. We were very excited for GA but not anymore:(

[WillT]

Hi everyone. Andre's right - we had a lot of features that we wanted to deliver and this didn't quite make it. We are working on it right now! It's also tied into the experience for navigating up and down through that hierarchy and we've had lots of feedback from users that the old mechanism for this wasn't intuitive - so we're spending some time redesigning that. It might mean that we hold back from support for basic hierarchies for a month or so but you won't have to wait long! In the meantime - we've seen most users hide the underlying fields that they use in their hierarchies, if that's the case for you then you can unhide them in the SSAS model and use them in your reports. You won't get the same folder-like structure but you'll still be able to get to the fields. Thanks for trying out Power BI!

[HarrisMalik]

Well the situation is same at our end. We are in phase of BI tool selection and our management had some concerns that Power BI is not a mature product right now and these type of things actually add fuel to fire.

I agree with most of the feedback that the old hierarchies and drill down was not very intuitive but there is big difference between non intuitive and not available. Microsoft made us to re-think our plans.

[daguto81]

Well this kind of throws a wrench into things. 

I{ve been pushing in my company to use a BI Service and Power BI was the main contender. Sisense was the other one because of general polish and the drill down mode and Power BI having he Q&A kept it alive. Then I learned that using hierarchies you could basically do Drill Down and it was a no brainer that Power BI was the way to go (Taking into account that this worked 10 days ago). 

Now last week the Drill Down feature just dissappeared, I contacted support and they told me it was down for a few days for the GA release so all was good. Now it seems it's not coming for a while now.  Now I have to go into the office tomorrow and explain how the Drill Down functionality is simply gone from Power BI which will not go well. 

I hope you guys reintroduce Hierarchies and Drill Down (which I'm sure you guys are working on integrating it into the new canvas) pretty soon so that my bosses can take another look at Power BI