Development Tips For Your PowerBI Dashboard

PowerBI is a powerful tool that is able to handle both data transformation and data visualization. In recent years, the developers behind PowerBI have introduced PowerBI online: a new cloud solution where offline PowerBI Desktop users can upload their dashboards and share it with other licensed users.

While the new solution is quite useful, PowerBI does contain certain limitations that Desktop users should be aware of. Check out the following tips on what Desktop users should pay attention to before uploading their dashboards.

Check your online storage space often to make sure your dashboard isn’t pulling in too much data, which would exceed your Data Capacity Limit of 10 GB. Your dataset has a 1GB limit so make sure your dashboard doesn’t hit that limit as well when pulling in data.

3: Simplify Your Dashboards and Spread Content Out

One thing that may also slow down the performance of PowerBI online Dashboards are DAX formulas. While DAX formulas take up very little resources, if there is an alternative to DAX, like built-in table features, use those instead of the DAX. Having too many DAX formulas in your dashboards can drastically slow things down.

Another thing to take note of is to not squeeze all your panels in the first dashboard. Having too many panels rendered in the first dashboard page not only slows things down but also makes it hard for the user to distinguish the information in the dashboard, as everything is too crammed together. Ideally only include three to four visualizations in each dashboard page. Also, include filters in each page to allow users slice and dice their data.

4: Subscribe to PowerBI Newsletters

PowerBI is a tool that’s constantly evolving. Subscribing to relevant newsletters gives you insights for new game-changing features that have been added. For instance, PowerBI Online now includes dataflow, which is an ETL tool that works similarly to PowerBI Desktop’s query/transform mode. This allows more flexibility in your data cleaning process.

Consider checking out the official Microsoft PowerBI site to register for their weekly updates. Other resources like sqlbi and PowerBi Weekly offer regular tips and white papers surrounding the platform. Brushing up on new updates and tips can help you fully harness the power of your system.

5: Always Build a Proof-of-Concept Before You Build the Real Thing

Proof-of-concept is to make sure that the PowerBI Online App you are building includes everything you need for it to work. Not doing a proof-of-concept may cause you to miss certain key issues in the app development process. For example, if you want to schedule PowerBI to refresh without using PowerBI DataFlow, then you have to host a gateway on a secure windows PC. Thi is so that the data is able to be imported through that gateway to your PowerBI online app. If you had not tried this out as a Proof-of-concept, you might have assumed that uploading the PowerBI app is enough to schedule your data refreshes.

In all, PowerBI developers not only need to make sure their metrics are calculated correctly, but they also need to think about time and space. Time refers to the time it takes to load a dashboard; Space refers to the ETL process: how to clean and store the data needed to be used in their metrics.

Thus it is important for them to pay attention to the features and limitations of the apps they are using. It is best to test things out as often as possible, go through the app’s documentation, and plan out the dashboard building process.