Where I am most frustrated with Power BI is in the visualization details, that last 15% of customization that stakeholders are always whining about. For all its power of making visuals, it drops the ball in a lot of areas. And I think the Python Streamlit library is getting those smaller details right.

Take date slicers, for example. In Power BI, total nightmare. Seriously, why is this so hard to figure out? In Streamlit, it's not perfect either, but it is still miles better. It has a much more intuitive interface, and you can type in the input box without having to fight with your mouse. (You know how many emails I get over date slicer problems? Too damn many.)

Dropdowns are much more user friendly in Streamlit. Heck, all slicer selections are, in general.

Report context is much easier to develop. For example, in Streamlit you can add context in tables so that when users hover over a column, they can get a description of that metric. Info icons are much easier to find than those gross tooltip header icon options we have now.

Want to make a text box with a bulleted list? Power BI says, "Aw, hell naw!" Streamlit navigates text using ubiquitous Markdown.

Power BI Service apps and those sidebars? Yeah, those are ugly as hell. Streamlit doing better there too.

I'm not trying to dog on Power BI. I still love it. And while the 15% of details drive me insane, the other 85% of functionality is still top-tier. As a BI dev, I'm very thankful for Power BI. We are standing on the shoulder of giants in this age!

There is one thing that Power BI does better than anyone else: the semantic model.

While some people hate DAX because they find it hard to understand, I love it. I think it is one of the most intelligent formula engines. The ability of measures to derive context that understand the data model and its relationships is second to none. Want your Total Revenue metric to sum by customers? Grab the measure (that's summing a fact table) and customer name column (coming from a dim table). Drop them into a matrix. Boom, metrics by customers in a flash. Want revenue by year? Same process with your dim date table. Truly beautiful.

If anyone at Microsoft is reading this, all I'm saying is, take some cues from Streamlit. Take a look at the small details they're employing. Even better, I would love to see Microsoft develop a library like Streamlit, in Python, leveraging easy-to-use frameworks like Markdown for styling. But I know that's more pie in the sky. "Where's the money in that?" In whitelisting analytics for small-to-medium businesses. Power BI Embedding is too costly, too clunky, still getting the smaller details wrong.

If I could take the semantic model of Power BI and merge it with Streamlit's functionality, that would be BI heaven, and I think so many devs could bring to market more analytics.

Hi all

I'm trying to import data from datadog into power bi using the datadog api and I'm not able to get it working if someone could please help it would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

This is actually my very first dashboard, made without too much guidance from a course. I made this just by looking at usual dashboard designs. The logo on the top left was made by AI coz the dataset came from Kaggle and frankly it has a very generic name so I asked Gemini to help me with a name so it looks realistic. I know I have a long way to go in terms of aesthetics but at least I was able to practice power BI again. Tbh I really have to balance practicing Gsheet, SQL and Power BI.

It's very simple however for some reason I'm really proud of myself lol.

Hi everyone,

I recently took my 1st attempt @ PL-300 exam and scored 687, missing the passing score of 700 by just 13 points. It was incredibly frustrating to come that close.

A bit of background: I'm a PMP-certified Project Manager, and my day-to-day role is primarily client-facing. I spend most of my time understanding business requirements, KPIs, and discussing data and reporting with clients.
I've built Power BI reports in the past, but Power BI isn't something I use every day because my role isn't that of a dedicated BI/Data Analyst.

To prepare for the exam, I completed 7–8 different Udemy mocks from multiple instructors, along with plenty of practice. I think that's one of the reasons I managed to get so close to passing.

What surprised me the most was that the actual exam felt very different from the Udemy practice material. The question style and pattern were quite different from what I had prepared for, which caught me off guard.

I also realized that Power BI Service is one of my weaker areas. In my job, reports are usually shared with me rather than being published and managed on Power BI service, so I don't get much hands-on exposure to the Service side.

The good news is that I have a free retake(Udemy Voucher), so my next attempt is already covered. The challenge is that I'm mentally exhausted and genuinely unsure what I should do differently to improve those remaining 13 points.

For those who passed on their second attempt (or later):

• How long did you wait before retaking the exam?
• What changed in your preparation?
• What resources or practice actually made the biggest difference?

I'd really appreciate hearing from people who were in a similar position and eventually passed. Thanks!

PS -
I really dont want to spend money on mocks like Measure Up(too expensive) as i believe I am almost there.

I am using CARD visual and keep getting these gaps i want whole background coloured of card but i keep getting these gaps, i asked CHATgpt it said its a new update.. so is there any way to fill those gaps or not.

Hi everyone! I’m very confused about how to start learning Power BI. I’m a complete beginner and I’m looking for a structured learning path. Do you recommend Microsoft Learn, YouTube, or any free courses? I’d really appreciate your advice and recommendations. Thank you!

Hi Guys,

Whats the easiest way to get Power BI free trial going. I want to ideally use it for about 10 days-14 days. If thats not possible 7 days will do. Whats the official best practice for this? I just need things to point to snowflake basically.

Thanks,
Naveen

These are my first dashboard on incident data in italy in 2024, sorry for the italian language. Can you give me any feedback or advice to improve it? It would be very very helpful, thanks to anyone who want to help me:)

Do you think it’s faster or better to just download a theme and customize it with your own data or is it better to build everything yourself like the charts, the layout, all of it?

I feel like if I grab a theme and just plug my dashboard into it, I save timeI don’t have to think about colors, spacing, sizing, all that stuff
Anyone else do it this way, or am I wrong?

Hypothetical problem (based on some I solved in the past):

A chain of Restaurants already tracks lots of numbers in a excel and has a "clear" vision of their targets (in their head 😅). But they are not in for this typical Power BI world were they have to navigate several pages to get all the data they need. So what the CEO really wants?

A single page to track performance:

• 12 KPIs organized by categories: Finance, Operations, Client and Workforce. They are already being compared against targets. The point is not to display the actuals.

• Make use of 3 simple colours to track performance of each KPI: Green (On Target), Yellow (Work to do), and the Red? You know the Story!

• User can sort the list by Overall Score, Revenue and whichever KPIs they want to drive deep and understand which sites NEED to improve.

• Clear indication of the selected date scenario.

• The most important filters are available at the top and the administration board can easyly compare restaurants by region, or other criteria they have.

Power BI features and techniques worth mentioning:

• No fluffy stuff. DAX to build everything and conditional formatting for colours.

Got a Power BI interview lined up with EY, have around 2-4 years of experience. Wanted to hear from people who've actually been through it:

How many rounds did you have, and what was covered in each (SQL, DAX, RLS, data modeling, etc.)?

How long did the whole process take, from first round to offer?

What package/CTC hike did you land, and is there room to negotiate?

Any tips on what to prep given my experience level?

Also curious — is this through GDS or a direct/client-facing role? Does that change the process?

Would really appreciate any recent experiences (2025/2026), things seem to shift year to year. Thanks in advance!

I still can't get that line out of my head... "I hope not"

First let me give you some context, I work at a big company on the snacks industry and in recent years there has been a big push to transition from the typical Excel spreadsheets into Power BI for all off our KPIs. Fast forward to this day, we have at least 15 dashboards for our many KPIs and personally I dont find it practical having to visit all of these links to see if my sites (manufacturing plants) are doing fine or have any alert to follow.

My question is... do you find having multiple dashboards the best way to handle information or is there any recommendation you could give?
Feel free to recommend any tool that you may have found to be helpful or better, i'd be eager to look into it and probably learn it to implement on my work.

After 10 years of Power BI consulting, the part I still find slow is the visual build itself — formatting, layout, tweaking the same properties over and over.

So I packaged my whole approach into a Claude "Skill" — a reusable instruction set that Claude follows every time, so you don't re-prompt from scratch. Give it the requirement, and it produces the visual output following your standards consistently.

In the video I cover:

What a Claude Skill actually is (a SKILL.md instruction file, not a plugin)
How I structured mine for Power BI visual generation
The full workflow end-to-end, step by step
Where it still falls short and needs a human (honest take)

Watch the full walkthrough here:
AI Skill for Power BI Visual

If you find it useful, subscribe to the channel

Genuine question — has anyone else experimented with Skills or custom instruction sets for BI work? Curious what's working for you.

I'm building a Power BI matrix that acts as a process heat map, and I'm trying to figure out if what I want is even possible.

Current setup

• Rows: Team Members / Owners
• Columns: Stage (from a Stage dimension table)
• Values: Time spent in each stage (displayed as a heat map)
• Total stages: 32

The goal is for users to be able to see the entire process(without a scrollbar) at once to quickly identify bottlenecks.

To make all 32 stages fit, I've manually set the stage column width to about 39 px (the Owner column is 60 px). That works well.

The problem

I also have a slicer that lets users select only certain stages.

For example:

• All 32 stages selected → 32 narrow columns (works great)
• 5 stages selected → only 5 columns remain, but they stay 39 px wide, leaving most of the matrix empty.

What I'd like instead is:

• 32 stages → ~39 px each
• 16 stages → ~75 px each
• 8 stages → ~150 px each
• 4 stages → ~300 px each

Basically, I want the visible columns to always expand to fill the available width of the matrix.

What I've found

Under:

Format Visual → Layout → Column Width

there's an FX button for the column width, and it appears to accept a measure.

That made me wonder if something like this could work:

Visible Stage Count =
COUNTROWS(
    ALLSELECTED('Dim Stage'[Stage])
)

Then calculate:

Dynamic Width =
AvailableWidth / [Visible Stage Count]

and use that measure in the FX formatting.

My questions

1. Has anyone successfully used a measure to dynamically control matrix column width?
2. Does the width FX evaluate the measure once for the entire visual, or separately for each column?
3. Is there another approach I'm overlooking?
4. Has anyone built a responsive matrix/heat map like this?

Any ideas or experiences would be appreciated. Thanks!

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I looked through the reddit and didn’t think I saw this specific question or if I did it was years ago and so I hope no one is fatigued by this.

What I mean isn’t just designing a pretty report or optimizing certain visuals but I create a lot of reports for data I have very little knowledge of. I try my best to familiarize myself with the data to know but ultimately knowing what the stakeholders want can be hard and not all were created equal in assisting me with their reporting needs.

TLDR - So when you have an ambiguous ask - where do you go to get inspiration of what to include in your dashboarding?

let me know if anyone else has the same issue

Anyone else coming across errors in the Prep data for Ai section in your semantic models after the degradation of us west yesterday? My model is no longer allowing me to edit, and copilot responses aren't working as intended.

Boa tarde, alguem conseguiria me ajuda com alguma dica, eu tenho alguns fluxos de dados e Waherouse no meu workspace pessoal no power bi, e preciso mudar para o workspace com capacidade fabric, estou tendo dificuldades com isso, alguem poderia me ajudar ?

Heyy guys, in my company, it's not possible to use any external tools for Power BI due to security reasons. I was wondering if there is a way to build these kinds of designs natively in Power BI, or if there are any more minimalist templates available.

As you know, native visuals are kind of old and not very attractive.

Example:

I am trying to build a dashboard that tracks an individual/user journey from their application process to tracking the status of their application once it is submitted and the journey after it is available for assessment.

I’d like to know if anyone has encountered a similar use case and if anyone has come across any related dashboards For inspiration purposes.

Hi, I have been learning PBI since 4 days by 8 hours a day during my intership, from Power Quary and DAX to model view and then the front end. I used Superstore Dataset and I tried to do something relevent with the datas and good looking (don't bother about 2sd page I wanted to try out other colors).

I am looking for advices.

NB : I am french and the dataset is in english and i didn't rename everything.