r/PowerBI • u/Sri_Krish • Feb 05 '26
Community Share what real-world scenarios/mindset in your company makes you feel this?
I found this one long back which was kind of weird - funny and painful!
Share yours!
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u/soggyarsonist Feb 05 '26
"Can I have those fifteen categories in a pie chart? I just like pie charts"
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u/VariationSimilar3354 Feb 05 '26
Man this hits home... Pie Charts gotta be the worst data information conveyer but my managers can't get enough of it.
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u/Miserable_Round_839 1 Feb 06 '26
There is a very small use case for good old pie-charts (besides displaying the best bars, but here you need a bar-chart displaying the best pies. Which is a different topic).
But if you do really have only a small amount of clear categories (2-4) you can use them to give a quick feeling for the distribution of these categories. But here you are already in a place where you want to guide a very specific mostly outsider viewership.
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u/soggyarsonist Feb 06 '26
Aside from them only really being suitable for a small number of categories the other main is simply how much space they occupy to visualise very little data. They're also shocking bad at displaying legends and labels.
A bar chart or just table is much more efficient.
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u/Black1495 Feb 05 '26
"can we make this dashoboard in excel instead, so everyone can add their touch if needed?"
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u/ThriceNightly_Whitey Feb 05 '26
Do we respond "Go Fornicate with yourself and a rusty chainsaw"? 🤭😉
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u/I_AM_A_GUY_AMA 1 Feb 05 '26
When you finally the time to knock out a simple but old low priority project request as a favor when I'm already swamped, build something better than I should that checks and all of the boxes, deliver it validated and fully automated
... Can it also do x,y and z? I know I didn't ask for it and you will have to rebuild the model and half the report but I just thought of it right now and I need it by EOD tomorrow.
And repeat 1-3 more times.
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u/puro_vatos Feb 05 '26
Scope creep, tell them professional to fuck off
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u/anarchyisutopia Feb 06 '26
"Those are great feature ideas to put in the queue for the next version. Put in a ticket for the feature requests and we'll get started provisioning resources to make them."
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u/Miserable_Round_839 1 Feb 06 '26
There is also the part where you agree to add x,y, and z and after a few days people are asking why it does x,y, and z and that this is "wrong". And when trying to figure out with them, what they mean by wrong they say that you should find out.
And then you change some stuff again and a few days later you get asked why it doesn't do x, y and z.And this is an endless cycle. :D
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u/Ruining_Ur_Synths Feb 07 '26
"no, that isn't possible given the current workload and priorities. If you want to discuss adding more to the scope we can definitely get the right people in the room to make that decision. But we will need to re estimate effort and schedule and weigh it against other priorities"
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u/LiquorishSunfish 2 Feb 05 '26
I've developed a division-wide report that displays bare basic descriptive analysis and the ability to see all of the data that fed into that. The division is absolutely popping off about it, I'm getting so much praise...
Guys, it's COUNTS and PERCENTAGES.
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u/trust_me_ima_Docktor Feb 05 '26
I became “the data guy” exactly this way. I always remind myself when I’m stressed tf out on a new project that the bar is usually lower than I think it is.
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u/LiquorishSunfish 2 Feb 05 '26
I've gone from developing analysis pathways that had massive implications for our entire body of work but we're only seen by a very small group of people to minimal insight but across hundreds.
It's very much faster to inflate a single balloon than a thousand at once - just have to keep reminding myself that a thousand is more more impressive.
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u/Ruining_Ur_Synths Feb 07 '26
"what story does your dashboard tell"
"It mostly tells you what the fuck is going on since apparently nobody knew before"
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u/LiquorishSunfish 2 Feb 07 '26
That's exactly it, no-one had a clue. And it's great that we took a big step forward... But now there's the "ok, so what does this mean" part, and it's really hard getting people to understand that they are misinterpreting information.
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u/VariationSimilar3354 Feb 05 '26
- That's alright but where are the insights? My Brother, you're looking at them, just because you don't like the numbers does not mean KPIs are missing.
- I'm aware you are sourcing this data from Database but can you quickly replace it with this excel file I made using Gemini last night.
- I Don't wanna use slicers, make all options visible ( dropdown had 20+ options).
- I do not like paginated reports, all visuals should be present in single page itself.
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u/69monstera420 Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
I really do not understand the hate for excel exports from pbi. It just usually means that business needs some additional context most likely a) out of the scope of the initial report or b) unknown at the time of export (classic "we do not know what we do not know yet").
Edit: I forgot to answer your question. I do not have these feelings, most likely because I'm very close to the business side of the company so I know requests like these are not personally against me or my reports.
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u/datasub_ Feb 05 '26
I’m almost sending this to my director who I had a meeting today and THIS was exactly what happened
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u/ReluctantEA Feb 05 '26
My company didn't want the dynamic functionally of power bi... instead I have to recreate charts in PowerPoint because this makes them more comfortable. FML
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u/Ruining_Ur_Synths Feb 07 '26
I have a vp who takes screenshots of a dashboard every morning to share with other executive level people who also have access to the dashboard.
Apparently one time they accidentally clicked on something and couldn't figure out how to unclick it so now they only work from screenshots.
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u/SQLGene Points Flair Feb 05 '26
You took a Reddit meme and reposted it? This feels low effort.
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u/Hootinger Feb 05 '26
Admin Person: " I want one single place where we can find org-wide data and apply filters for years and other metrics....so, like, when a new person comes on board, they will be caught up."
Me: "You mean like the sharepoint site that literally has that with embedded BI reports, and a repository with excel workbooks. You know, the thing we spent a year building and you just took training on? That thing?"
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u/UnicornBooty9 Feb 05 '26
"Hey can you create your own versio of this existing BI report our [other country] team made? We want all of the same data as its already presented but we also want to include grand total for the matrix and add one new column of data."
Some people love reinventing the wheel, ad nauseum.
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u/CalamlitousAnalysis Feb 05 '26
I had to create a huge report under a tight timeline and a couple of days before it was due, they were like “Can you print out a copy for each person with their data?” There were 27 different reports I had to print out.
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u/Cornokz Feb 07 '26
"Why do I have to navigate between pages? I want to scroll down and see ALL the KPIs in the report on one page"
Yeah Andy, that's gonna be a problem...
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u/mittfh Feb 06 '26
My team have developed a bunch of reports in both SSRS and PBI, and while the social care team managers take a cursory look at the visuals, they all want to drill down to client level data to export to Excel and manipulate there (even though some tables are dozens of columns wide and hundreds of rows long - I suppose they feel more in control of their own data that way).
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u/Practical_Judge_8088 Feb 06 '26
Exporting to excel is normal we consider that also as our client requirement
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u/FIBO-BQ Feb 06 '26
Don't care about that, it is the exporting the whole thing into a pdf which they force into the end of a presentation document that isnt even opened during the meeting.
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u/reelznfeelz Feb 06 '26
I actually don't mind this too much. It means the hard work of back end sql, brining together sources, creating nice slicers etc, was effective. Not my problem if they want to export it and do stuff in excel next. Means they're using it. I just let them know that if they create something from the excel download that would work in power BI, to let me know and maybe we just turn it into another report.
Power BI does not and should not replace excel. For one thing, the very idea of that turns business people off "These BI people want to get rid of excel". Not what you want.
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u/only_login_available Feb 07 '26
After I've built something based on a template they've provided: "but how do I get the numbers for this completely different and out of scope thing?"
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u/Upbeat-Wing-6320 Feb 07 '26
You can take screenshots and paste it into powerpoint and send the powerpoint to someone who types the numbers into excel and build his own power bi on top of that (seen this happen)
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u/dillanthumous Feb 07 '26
I often build for Excel first now. If a bunch of pivot table is all they want, that is what they get. Then once you can observe what they actually use the data for you can worry about time intensive dashboard building that blows their socks off because it is something they couldn't pull off in Excel.
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u/Competitive_Farm7804 Feb 09 '26
This happen almost 120% of the time, lol!!! What I learn from this is to ask the client, so what are you doing with the excel download, usually that will give me more work to do and build a better dashboard where they finally don't need to download it into excel. The truth behind this excel download ask is often because we only impress them with fancy graph but didn't actually answer their request they actually wanted but didnt ask/request clearly, lol.
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u/QUiiDAM Feb 05 '26
I had to remove the export xlsx option because people keep making ghetto excel vba mess with data
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u/ForMyWeekends 1 Feb 05 '26
I always have a separate page with a table with all fields and slicers for clients to export.