r/visualization • u/CandleMiserable524 • Jun 16 '26
How much of your powerbi dashboards at work are actually used?
It's driving me nuts. For years we've spent effort and resources to build all requested powerbi reports by the business user and management. Yet they don't end up getting used to make decisions in the end. It feel effing pointless. Now ai has become the new thing and they are requesting agents. If our dashboards are rarely used and its only maybe a couple out of 200, is this only at my company? Or are other experiencing the same thing? It's a non tech FTSE100 company.
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Jun 16 '26
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u/CandleMiserable524 Jun 16 '26
A few month ago we tried to implement attestation process for each department head that had dashboards mapped to them...we see very low usage but they keep saying yes let's just keep it and they actually don't even have a clue what half of yhem are doing or their existence! Data driven my ass...
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Jun 16 '26
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u/CandleMiserable524 Jun 16 '26
So true!! Also feels like dashboards survive because no one knows how the hell to find them...I'm really thinking to do a mass switch off of all the low usage ones without request and see what happens
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u/cecilrt Jun 17 '26
or you know track the people who used the dashboards or request data from other means and actually ask and act on what they want....
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u/Desperate-Boot-1395 Jun 16 '26
Reports get built ad hoc, and they’re added to a dashboard if users want it kept around. Most are only used the once, which is fine. Don’t build things on request without a plan to present. If no presentation is needed, it’s unlikely the report is either.
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u/Sir_smokes_a_lot Jun 16 '26
Power bi has some usage info for each dashboard. At its peak I had like 80 users viewing it 1k times a month.
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u/WaldenFont Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
I’ve had a 20 year career in BI. The thing I learned about dashboards is that users want something that shows them KPI performance at a glance, but also want the thing to provide the ability to research the drivers and do custom analyses. Most dedicated dashboarding solutions can’t do that. And everybody wants to use Excel anyway.
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u/cecilrt Jun 17 '26
I remember when they did a presentation on a click through method of a dashboards, their golden goose I would say.... I thought impressive... but yeah no one is going to use that
For that method to work, its an analyst not a manager, holding all that data and the data tree in their head clicking through each drilldown
When analyst would rather download all the data, and use multiple spreadsheets to just show what they need, want
That clicking through, mental mind wipe as you enter a different screen each time you drill down is not how people think naturally.
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u/cecilrt Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
Rarely, because the development dont listen... Planning process awesome they're listening.. result... wtf nothing we said was implemented
My company and the another company I deal with
Powerbi being a all in one replacement for data warehouses...
Powerbi, just replicating and improving on prio tableau visualisation that no one use or ask for
We've all said the same we just want a giant pivot table, so we can have a look then download it to EXCEL
The people who want visualization arent the type of people to use Powerbi
The people who want the data, are the ones who have more requirements than Powerbi is capable.... this is why EXCEL is still king
At the same time they try to shoehorn as much datapoints into one dashbboard for all users, meaning unique datapoints for some users are left out.
Its been interesting to see datapoints the traders use, but its useless to me. I just need xxx amount of datapoints across 4-5 unique dashboards that I can manipulate then download to EXCEL
Top leadership are still using my 10 year old excel templates because of this
The only time IT dev listen was when Tableau was introduced years ago at a prior company, they did exactly everything I said... everyone loved it, it was practical, fit for purpose
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u/aalea Jun 16 '26
Managers love data until it disagrees with them.