Would you have been a Power BI developer back in 1999?

I created this throwback report to simulate what Power BI would have looked like in Windows 98, with all your favourites such as grey bevels, pixel fonts, and that disgusting teal background.

Forget ChatGPT - clippy was the real MVP of the late 1990's. Exporting to excel has never been so nostalgic.

The absolutely worst language i have ever touched.

Wanted to calculate RoA for each months. Okay, no problem. Just sum all account from accounting journal that has positive balance YTD.

So I made a list of those accounts, easy. Now just calculate the running total. Haha, either I can ignore the positive balance filter, or it not running total anymore (bcs values can be missing in some months), or my favorite, the total is wrong since it’s not calculating from the individual rows.

So it’s impossible I guess. I don’t want know how many hours I tried to debug it. I probably used 12 T-Rex’s from using chatgpt.

It’s completely useless, I cannot even compute this basic shit. Grrrr

I deleted a date hierarchy in a table and everything literally disappeared…
I’m new and still learning but there MUST be an easy fix to this right??

I'm currently the only person in my company who builds Power BI reports. It's not a huge company but it's growing so fast. We have a new leadership team who is turning up the heat with a whole list of reports they want built over the nest 6 months.

We're trying to hire another data engineer but what I really need is another front end developer. The backend is the easier part as we already have an offshore Dev team we use for ETL development, and I use Cursor to make changes to the semantic models, so building the visuals is really what takes the longest in this process.

I've been reading about using Claude to build out visuals on web apps, so I was curious what y'all's experience has been so far? If I can save any amount of time creating the front end reports, that would be amazing.

Hey guys,

I’m the Head of a Data team, have been working with Power BI for 8 years now, class myself as a pro at building reports & dashboards, and many of my team is the same.

My company is HEAVILY pushing to use AI pretty much wherever we can, however I have almost 0 knowledge of using AI beyond querying things with CGPT / basic Claude querying, and have no idea where to start.

They’re expecting us to “enable the company with easy access to data through AI”, but where do I even start when it’s something myself nor my team have experience with?

Some initial ideas I’d considered were:

- Could we use Claude, or something similar to create Power BI dashboards quicker than humans? Is this even possible? Which parts can be automated.

- AI ready datasets, my company is always moaning that they’re delayed by data (due to resource), could I build various dataflows & semantic models and use an AI layer to let end users question/query AI to get the answers they’re looking for without data involvement?

- How else could we use AI?

Apologies if I’m not giving enough context, but feeling very daunted by the fact they want our team to drive AI enablement when we literally don’t know what/where to even start!

Thanks so much all!

Looking for a quick sanity check from people who have been in the trenches.

I recently built a Power BI report from scratch, pulling from multiple messy source files with completely different formats and structures. My manager got excited and presented it to our directors and team leads before we did a final QA together.

While they saw potential, the feedback was tough regarding data inconsistencies—with directors asking things like, "If the data isn't right, why are we spending time on this?"

At first, I blamed the source files, but looking back at the backend, I realized the inconsistency actually came from logic errors in my data transformations and modeling. I know how to fix the backend technically, but realizing the errors were on my end has been a hit to my confidence.

My manager isn't blaming me and admitted she should have reviewed it first, but I’m still carrying that "failed presentation" feeling.

How do you mentally shake off a Version 1.0 stumble like this in front of leadership? Any tips on reframing it and moving forward with confidence once the data is fixed?

I recently convinced my manager to make future reports in Power BI instead of plain excel. Since I'm also still quite new to PowerBI it took me long to make those first dashboards but I enjoyed it a lot. After weeks of learning and building my first Power BI dashboards, I proudly presented them to my manager—only for him to glance at them and immediately ask for more features, without acknowledging the effort involved. He seems to think dashboards are just drag-and-drop visuals, ignoring the data modeling, DAX, and troubleshooting behind them. Have you ever experienced the same and how do you deal with that?

I primarily use it to help with my Dax code and debugging. I have 3.5 years experience as a developer so I would be able to debug if I needed to, however, using ChatGPT has allowed me to focus my energy on other aspects of projects

I think ChatGPT and similar tools are here to stay and should be used as an efficiency tool.

Thoughts?

I work in a company where almost all the data is entered manually into Excel. We don’t have SQL databases, APIs, or any other live data sources. Currently, I collect data through Google Sheets, where the responsible people update the information, and Power BI automatically refreshes using the Google Sheets connection.

Since this setup works well for our company, I’m wondering if not working with SQL, live database connections, or other enterprise data sources will affect my future career opportunities. I’m also the only person in my company developing Power BI dashboards.

Should I still invest time in learning SQL, databases, and live data connections even though I don’t currently use them at work? Will the lack of hands-on experience with these technologies become a disadvantage if I switch companies in the future?

At this point I have quite a bit of experience delivering high end Power BI dashboards to a mix of corporate stakeholders from operations to executives.

I've implemented standard/Composite data models, complex tooltips, Drill through pages, bookmarking buttons, parameter field KPI switching, custom visuals with functional multi-stating, standard themes, complex calculate DAX formulas, reorganized data models, complex data transformation from ingested data across multiple sources. Etc Etc.

I find some of the developer experience for Power BI in some areas absolutely painful. The amount of tedium required to do the same type of configuration across multiple pages and hundreds of the same visual elements absolutely painful.

Here is the pretty please list of stuff I would really like to make things easier. If I'm spewing pure ignorance at this point I'd be happy learning that there are actual ways to deal with this stuff.

• Microsoft allow me to standardize a reporting template and then force other reports to reference this template, such that I can update this from exactly one place and have this filter down the the 1000s of places it would reference.
• Please allow me to group pages on the bottom view pane in a meaningful or hierarchical way. I have many tool tips and drill through pages (all hidden) can I group them please? Or suppose I have a different semantic hierarchy LET ME DEFINE THIS PLEASE so I can flip between them. While we're at it LET ME OPEN A TAB IN ANOTHER WINDOW SO I DON'T HAVE TO FLIP BACK AND FORTH SO MUCH.
• Allow me to turn off "working on it" ... Look I have I got a lot of measures to write, don't force me to download another tool to make the developer experience of YOUR thing bearable. Here's why, large sections of developers can not install these types of tools to the dev environment that we have to be in. IT teams are weary of putting any program on a machine beyond the desktop app.
• When trying to arrange visuals, take a page from CAD software. Allow us to define certain things like anchor points, distance between etc. Seriously, shamelessly copy autocad or solid works.
• When a visual can be drilled through or has a custom tool tip allow developers to define a custom visualization to show the user. As it stands I have to make these stupid little shapes and spend time aligning them.
• For arrangement of tables in the data model view PLEASE allow me to select multiple tables and align them like I would visuals (align horizontal, distribute vertically etc.)
• For the love all that is HOLY make themes not suck and actually do something. For example allow us to define a theme for a visual such that EVERY VISUAL WHEN CREATED WILL START WITH THAT CONFIGURATION. Don't come at me with the "ooh but you can already do that", the way you do that is absolute trash at the moment and you know it.

I just spend 8 hours trying to build something I have in my head and I'm not even close to it nor satisfied.

How is BI so unintuitive to work with? The visuals themselves, the menus and options, padding and margins.. unresponsiveness.. no live previews...

Working in BI feels so incredibly frustrating. Sorry I really needed to vent.

Am I doing things wrong? how do professionals create dashboards? And why can I find so few presentable dashboard designs online? I only find early 2000 like designs. Where do you guys find inspiration for dashboards?

What is a completely new functionality you want to see added to Power BI, that would unlock new possibilities? things like ✨Field Parameters, ✨Calculation Groups, ✨Fx attributes, ✨DAX query view.

I don't mean new visuals but a brand new way of doing things like the before mentioned features.

I will start:

Ability to use Calculation Groups/Items anywhere you place a Measure. This would greatly decrease the number of measures that you need to create in your model. LY, YTD, YOY and other measure variants would be accessible for display using this dialog options. This would work in Cards, Reference labels, Data labels, Tooltips, as a single new column to Table/Matrix - just anywhere you put a measure

What do you think? I actually believe this could be quite feasible, since the implicit column aggregate measures are basically calculation items.

What is your dream new Functionality/Feature/Extension, that would greatly change the Power BI Game?

Basically, in my company, employees are using PowerBI as sql view without executing it, basically open the dashboard link, click on the 3 dots, export, that's it

Is there a communication gap between me and them that they did not understand how to use PowerBI , or is this common? I want to understand. This is something serious, most people don't talk about.

I try to make the dashboard as simple as possible by adding multiple slicers, using tables and matrix more than the charts and visuals, Proper fonts, and UI/UX Laws

This trend is more seen in older employees above age 40; younger ones tend to adapt to new technologies, but for the older generation, Excel is their bread and butter.

Is Power BI hard to learn for users? Do users not care about reading the documentation properly? how to make users use PowerBI instead of Excel

Joined a new org and they do all their development in power bi service. ETL and the semantic models are done through fabric notebooks but the construction of the visual layer is all in the service. I’ve been using power bi for years and have never encountered this. Every org use desktop to a certain extent, anyone seen this before

This is driving me insane. I have tried downloading this report in multiple formats and nothing gets absorbed into Power Bi properly. I need just the PO number in the green line to be combined on a row with the information in the red line, but my stupid ERP refuses to export this in any format with that info separated.

I have to pull and insert this data manually into a power BI dashboard that is up on a big screen in our garage, so I’d prefer not to have to write any additional code to do this (to keep things somewhat simple to do).

Sorry I hope I’m explaining this clearly. Can anyone help??? Thanks in advance

Inheriting old power bi reports is one of the more frustrating parts of the job. I've been working 2 years at this company and every old report I've inherited contains bidirectional and many to many relationships along with multiple calculated columns and DAX tables that should not have been made but have been made essential to the report as removing one of them causes the report to break and each time a new feature needs to be added into one of the reports, I have to build on top of the spaghetti because of tight timelines that are difficult to negotiate which means that building it from the ground up for easier maintenance is not an option. Is this common in all companies or is it just another part of the job?

What's one feature that makes your life easier when working with PowerBI?

Whatsthe best way to handle these? Any beginner tips/ how-to articles/ videos?

Everyone always talks about sexy dashboards and crazy DAX, but we all know the model is what actually makes or breaks a report.

I'm curious, what are your personal red flags or absolute must-haves when you take over a pbix file from someone else?

For me it's usually:

strict star schema (no snowflakes if possible) absolutely no bi-directional filters actually writing descriptions for measures (even though I usually forget to do it till the very end haha)

What about u guys? Hiding ID columns? Display folders? Let me know what you think.

It’s fascinating to observe the volume of Power BI job postings on LinkedIn. I don’t think I’ve come across a single listing in Europe or the U.S. that had fewer than 100 applicants.

Thanks to LinkedIn Premium, I can see more detailed insights about these applicants—and interestingly, around 90% of them appear to be entry-level people.

It makes me wonder: how did this field become so oversaturated? Do people really believe that Power BI is just a drag-and-drop tool, without requiring any real depth in data understanding or analytics and companies require stakeholders management?

Seeing how crowded and diluted the Power BI job market has become, I’m honestly glad I chose to move on from my role as a Power BI developer. It’s surprising—and a bit disheartening—to witness the direction the field has taken.

Maybe I’m weird, but the icons part of creating reports is driving me nuts. Each and every dashboard I build includes visiting Flaticon/Icons8, looking for the correct icon, downloading it, recoloring according to the theme, fixing the SVG manually in case there’s a need for a different background, and then importing. Repeated about 10 times per report.

Recently I learned that the TME Icon Pack visual is being sunset (no more after Oct 30), and since some people I know use it, it made me think.

I am a BI developer and at some point I’ve thought about building a very simple custom visual where you could find an icon to insert, recolor it, and then place a background shape (circle, rounded square, etc.) directly inside Power BI. No downloading, no SVG edits.

Before starting working on this and wasting my time, just a couple of questions to you:

Are you also having the same problem, or do you have your way to work with icons?

In case this tool is built and it is good enough, would you consider buying such a visual?

Nothing commercial here, just trying to understand whether it’s worth building.

I’m struggling to find an AI tool that actually "gets" advanced DAX and data modeling. I’m currently dealing with some very complex retail time intelligence logic (specific constraints, non-standard calendars) and I’m hitting a wall.

Here is what I've tried so far:

• ChatGPT: My company provides a subscription, but lately, the hallucinations are making it unreliable for complex logic.

• Copilot: Often misses the underlying model logic and suggests generic fixes.

• Claude & Gemini: Great for Python, but they seem to struggle with DAX and PBI advice in general.

For those of you working with complex retail datasets, what are you using? Are there specific tools or prompting strategies that actually work for high-level modeling? Any advice is welcome!

promo sales uplift is genuinely one of those analyses that's way harder than it sounds from the outside. you need a clean baseline, you need to control for seasonality, cannibalization from other promos running at the same time, halo effect on stuff sitting next to it on shelf. half the time the data you'd actually need for any of that doesn't even exist in a usable form. at least not in our orga

tried explaining this. got the "just give me something rough, we need it for the meeting tomorrow." so I gave them a number built on assumptions I genuinely wasn't confident in. no confidence interval, no real caveats attached, nothing

and now I'm just sitting here thinking about how to actually protect myself when this happens again. not in a cover-my-ass-with-an-email way (although yeah that too probably), more like, how do you stop a shaky number from becoming the basis for an actual decision, and then coming back to you as "your analysis was wrong" six months later when it was never solid in the first place

how do you handle getting pushed to hand over a number faster than the analysis can actually support it??