Power BI - What can go wrong?
Data is ultimately any organisation’s asset if it is transformed into information that facilitates actionable insights. Microsoft Power BI does just that, it helps to connect disparate data sets, transform and clean data into a data model and create charts or graphs to provide visuals of the data. So it’s an incredibly impressive platform packed with so much power and capabilities, however with this comes user error and common mistakes.
Perform a web or YouTube search and you will find many articles and videos that discuss mistakes made using Power BI. They cover a broad range of topics; unsurprising, since anything can go wrong between the initial connection to data; through data shaping and transformation, modelling, and calculations; to report design, final publishing and collaboration between colleagues. And that’s just for a single report. Take it up a level and we can find problems with how teams re-use data (or not) across multiple reports and, at a higher level again, strategic problems and mistakes made when deploying Power BI across an organisation.
In this blog, I have selected ten common mistakes across different areas and levels of detail. There are three mistakes discussed at the deployment level, three in report design, two on data modelling and two on data transformation. Whatever your interest is in Power BI, hopefully there are some that resonate and provoke some thoughts.