Welcome to the open thread for r/PowerBI members!
This is your space to share what you’re working on, compare notes, offer feedback, or simply lurk and soak it all in - whether it’s a new project, a feature you’re exploring, or something you just launched and are proud of (yes, humble brags are encouraged!).
It doesn’t have to be polished or perfect. This thread is for the in-progress, the “I can’t believe I got it to work,” and the “I’m still figuring it out.”
So, what are you working on this month?
I made this giant ass measure that takes a bunch of parameters and pops out like, “bad” or “good” but now they want it in a donut chart and I guess I gotta do some fucking work bc a calculated column is gonna suck
Sounds like a calculated table might do the job. Had to do something similar this month, through 14 different project metrics into field parameters, clients wanted something different, easiest way was just a calculated dax table to fit the data neatly into something a matrix could use.
Getting my head around UDFs and SVGs.
I am reading Cole Nussbaumer Knafic's Storytelling with Data. Will see if I can improve on my report design with the principles I'm learning. Wish the legend was more flexible - if only we could define a gradient of colours with conditional exceptions to better highlight the important bits!
Recently spent some figuring out power query functions. Came up with one to help modelling in dataverse. The documentation metadata was frustrating to figure out, but a bunch of Unicode to add formatting eventually got it user friendly.
Also gonna put together a review of the pbi certified Gantt charts and my recommendations for the company depending on use case and willingness to buy a licence. Is it just me, or does anyone else find Gantts to be really ineffective for delivering insights? I reckon a few interactive charts and slicers could more easily provide the necessary info in many cases (though not all), especially once the number of rows extends well beyond what can be shown at once.
Been reading Cole’s book as well and enjoying it. I have a lot of graphic design experience so a lot of what’s covered related to design isn’t new to me but I wanted to better understand how to incorporate different types of data visualizations into my reports and what to keep in mind from a data usability perspective. I’m on a mission to level up my visuals game as well and am gaining some valuable insights from it. How are you liking it?
I'm enjoying it too. Found it at the library and am about half way through. I did my thesis on control system HMI design, which has a lot of crossover with data storytelling.
It frustrates me a little that I often can't provide the full story with my reports, as the SME using it will know the why and I just provide the what. But I do occasionally get a project where I can actually be prescriptive with the recommended actions, so this will be especially useful for helping communicate in those cases.
I was definitely drawn to the storytelling component as well. I too don’t have many opportunities to put the more obvious elements of storytelling into use but I was hoping I’d find some inspiration for how to work it in more subtly even when it isn’t explicitly being called for or expected. Like, is there more I can be doing to guide the report user through the process of drawing the story out of the data for themselves without blatantly insinuating my own analysis that they didn’t ask for? And if I spot something I think is meaningful but perhaps not so obvious in the data, how can I help them discover it as well via good visual storytelling?
I used that book in my masters and got the 10th anniversary edition that just came out! There was a video session today that was recorded where she went over lots of good basics
Would love to hear your end result on Gantt charts. A particular client is hounding me to use one, and I've gone through every single Gantt chart I could download, nothing fits the bill or highlights stories efficiently, like you said!
Pretty much my view is if I have sufficient influence with the customer I'll steer as hard as possible away from a Gantt. Senior execs may get their way however.
A Gantt is basically a table with a bunch of data all thrown into it visually. This is very cluttered and not good for quick insights. It was good in its time, but we didn't have BI software in 1910.
I reckon a few KPIs like count behind schedule, count projects, count active and a table with some icon indicators would cover 90% of the insights people have to mentally calculate from a Gantt. A matrix with conditional formatting also does a good job.
I actually do like the Gantt resource version, as it's good at showing the progression of things. We use one at work to show the sequence of parallel activities and help prioritise reallocation of resources.
After a couple false starts, a whole lot of frustration and a HUGE assist from Gemini Pro, I have a very sophisticated inventory and revenue forecasting engine built out that is industry specific and sales channel aware. About to demo it to stakeholders tomorrow!
I don’t have the final report built yet until I’ve confirmed that the architecture meets expectations and needs but I do have a fully functional demo matrix with slicers and custom tooltip ready to show. I’ve made it very flexible so that stakeholders can focus on a specific channel or subset of items. It’s built with my company’s specific industry in mind with both planned demand and planned production incorporated in addition to a blended historical average approach (using rolling 3M, 6M and 12M averages) in order to forecast for channels and items with no planned demand.
I am extremely pleased with how it turned out and relieved I was able to finally get it to work. Definitely THE most complicated data modeling I’ve done thus far. Not sure yet how I’m going to layout the final report and what visuals I’ll use, but that’s the easy part (just tedious as we all know!).
Heck yes! Let us know how the demo goes to the stakeholders as well!
It went very well. The team was very impressed and I believe I exceeded expectations. I’ll need to make only a couple slight modifications to some logic but they were ready for me to make it live right away and expand on it from there. I knew it was a success when the company president got animated while suggesting all the different ways he sees the report being useful and had some ideas for immediate ways to put it to good use.
I'm intensely curious to see more of what you're talking about, though... I'm sure the specific client data is confidential. Let us all know how it goes tomorrow.
Yeah, I obviously can’t share any screenshots or anything of the actual data. Maybe over the weekend I’ll play around with mocking it up in design software with fake data and different industry if you want to see what I used in my demo today. For now, a description follows if you’re interested. If you’re more interested in the data architecture itself, I can describe that too if you want.
For the demo (which they want in the published report), I just had a simple matrix with month in columns, item categories and items in rows and 3 measures in values - Expected Units Sold, Projected Ending Inventory and Projected Revenue. The matrix is set to use a tooltip page for tooltips - on that page are Months On Hand, Projected End Month, Forecast Price and Forecast Run Rate. Past months show actual sales. Future months show forecasted sales. Tooltip shows common “static” data that’s always calculated as of today so doesn’t make sense to display directly in the matrix as they’d just repeat the same values for every month.
To the left of the matrix I had a list slicer filtered to the same set of items as the matrix with both item category and item. This was so that the items being included in the forecast could be fully customized for more targeted forecasting scenarios.
Lastly, at the top I had a scenario slicer so that they could dynamically affect the way the forecast was being calculated. They each had different use cases they might be used for, like seeing sales potential vs more realistic projections. There are some nuances in the business model that necessitate flexibility and I think it’s far more interesting to see the data from multiple perspectives so I gave them an easy way to do that.
3 projects at work, and going balls deep into the new Power BI MCP. Very likely I'll use it next year to go back and document all of our existing models and reports.
Well call me Gen-X but I never expected to read "balls deep" and "Power BI" in the same sentence ...
Readying some marketing reports for new campaigns in 2026. I have just found out this morning that the Salesforce dev work hasn't yet been done, so have had to put this on hold for now.
I am optimizing a report. We have a resources on a map. Customer sends a list how many resources do you have within 50 miles.
How many of our resources are covered by your resources within 50 miles.
That kind of thing
Just finished a six month long report build so just writing up notes and creating use-again pbix file with annotations to hopefully help me next time around. If I have time I'd like to investigate drastically reducing the number of visuals by having say a dynamic do all visual that switches based on the metric type and fiscal year selected in the slicers.
Current model is running into some big issues. Got way too complicated due to constant changing business requirements. So working on moving all the DAX calculations people made in the last couple of years upstream... So that's a lot of reports to go through. After that I need to clean up or recreate all the reports
I’m trying to explain to sales, why the answer to “where is the link to this dimension” cannot be “it depends” WITHOUT defining WHAT it depends on or in what scenario they want it to be which. This damn data model (or rather their source system) offers about 5 different paths (if I am not creative) to link this dimension to their fact tables. I am now tried to put their questions into full sentences. Plot twist: the concept of full sentences is also hard to comprehend 😭 I tried drawing the issue for them. I even invented an illustrative example. No luck so far… How do u handle this typeof situation?
I noticed my Power BI certification expired so I'm considering rewriting it.
Might not be worth it for me. I just did it for fun in the first place... and nobody much has asked to see it...
Other than that, I've been refining the various Power BI courses I teach and doing a bit of consulting.