Top 5 Power BI UX Gaps

Power BI has made tremendous strides in features solidifying its position as a BI leader and increasing the feature distance over the competition (see latest Gartner report here). And rightfully so, considering that it’s much more than a visualization tool. However, you might find its advanced presentation capabilities still lagging. During a current BI assessment for a large mortgage company, the executive sponsor who have used before Tableau and Qlik told me that “some features that could be done in Qlik or Tableau in 10 minutes could take days with Power BI”. So much about “five seconds to sign up, five minutes to wow!” It’s hard to vow an audience that has seen better …

Here are the top 5 Power BI UX gaps to watch for especially if you’re migrating to Power BI from these two tools:

1. No dynamic binding – A long time ago, Microsoft promised that most of the Power BI properties would be expression-driven. Only title captions and conditional formatting currently support expressions. However, it’s not uncommon for dashboards to let the user specify what dimension and measures that want to see in a visual. Dynamics measures are not so difficult to implement with calculation groups (require Tabular Editor as today Power BI Desktop doesn’t have UI for calculation groups). Dynamic dimensions are much more difficult to implement. This gap could be solved elegantly if one day Power BI decides to support expressions for fields used in a visual.
2. No visual container support – It’s also not uncommon to organize visuals in a tabbed interface to save space. The current kludge is to use bookmarks to show or hide UI elements leading to such as a mess that no one can figure out and that should make Microsoft ashamed. So, a container interface to implement a visual that can host other visuals would allow the community to come up with creative gadgets that should make this easier.
3. No repeater visual – Want to embed a graph or sparkline that’s repeated for each row in a table? Can’t do today unless you use DAX measure that render HTML or SVG (both approaches require advanced DAX or UI skills). Microsoft should extend the Table and Matrix visuals (BTW, why do we have two visuals?) to allow nesting and repeating other visuals, like SSRS Tablix.
4. No asymmetric crosstab layouts – Currently, Matrix supports only symmetric layouts where the measure is repeated for each column forcing developers to use black belt techniques, such as the one I describe in my “Implementing Asymmetric Reports in Power BI“. Microsoft should enhance Matrix to support flexible layouts, like the SSRS Tablix control.
5. No Default members – Almost every dashboard requires defaulting the time period to a current period and automatically preselecting it when the period changes, such as when a new month starts. And of course, the user should be able to switch easily to a past period. A long-term Tabular limitation is that it doesn’t support default members. This limitation and the lack of dynamic binding forces developers to come up with workarounds, the most common being replacing the caption of the current period, e.g. “Current Month”, with the caveat that the user can’t see what the current period is. Tabular default members or expression-based slicer and filter default could help.

As you’ve seen, the prevailing theme of this rant is that I’d like Power BI to add more SSRS-like features, so we don’t look for the exit sign when management asks for more advanced and visually appealing reports.