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I work as a data engineer in a BI team, with our product being part of a large software suite in healthcare. We got a small number power users who really use t

I work as a data engineer in a BI team, with our product being part of a large software suite in healthcare. We got a small number power users who really use the dashboards, who get real result from them and who actively help our development. We also got a larger group of people who use it once in a while. But most people seem to log in once or twice and then never again. And if you ask why it’s often because they couldn’t find the answer to their incredibly specific one-time only question, so they decided it’s all useless and they continue to work on their own personal homegrown BI-suite in excel. Also, we use Qlik and I absolutely hate it. Luckily I don’t have to work with it too often but whenever I do I feel like I’m always fighting it. Using Power BI and Tableau felt much more like working together to solve issues.

_delirium 5y ago
> And if you ask why it’s often because they couldn’t find the answer to their incredibly specific one-time only question, so they decided it’s all useless and they continue to work on their own personal homegrown BI-suite in excel. Hah this is probably me. The university I work for uses a BI tool (MicroStrategy) to track students/majors/etc. But I usually find it easier to use the BI tool primarily as a way to get a CSV or XLS export of enough source data to answer my question, and then do the actual analysis in Python+pandas. I can probably formulate my query in their weird proprietary query builder, but it seems unnecessarily complicated and I already know how to do data analysis in Python.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >their weird proprietary query builder If you're talking about Power Query, the best way to use it is to write code directly once you observe what the interface generates. It's a rather nice kind-of-functional language that really comes into its own when you start using/creating higher order functions. Power Query gave me an intense craving for a form of SQL with a similar facility for functions. For example, I have a lot of experience writing Oracle SQL, and Power Query didn't offer "grouping sets". But I realized it could be implemented using functions. It would be so great if SQL supported that.
perl4ever 5y ago
>they continue to work on their own personal homegrown BI-suite in excel. Why aren't you providing your dashboards via Excel, then? What exactly does the fancy BI software do that Excel won't? I have used Qlikview but not Tableau or Informatica, and I'm a bit fuzzy on what people mean when they say "Power BI". Is using Power Query what you would call Power BI? Or does that mean using the data model stuff? Power Query is the part of Excel that I particularly like because data kind of stays where you put it.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  PowerBI is kind of a MS Access for BI. It loads data from your warehouse and gives both visual builders and query interfaces to data. IE, it's a specific product name - the data viz tool from MS to accompany their other services.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    It seems to be part of Excel since 2016, no? It appears to me that it's morphed over time and I'm not sure to what extent it remains a separate product. I've used both DAX and M (Power Query) via recent versions of Excel. Obviously there are plenty of ways to interface with data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Pivot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Pivot says both Power Query and Power Pivot are part of Excel.
    - Rastonbury 5y ago
      It's a separate product, analogous/competitor to Tableau. Just go to the product page
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        I assume you're referring to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/ ? What I'm seeing there looks as though it is targeted at people who make the decision to buy products like this, but not to use them. I'm not seeing what couldn't be done with Excel 365 alone. There are screenshots with verbiage about how well it works with Excel. And they look like...Excel. I guess it supports R, and maybe makes it easier to seamlessly refresh a report. That's aggravating though, that it makes me suspect Excel might be purposely rough around the edges in order to not displace Power BI. As I've said a few times, I like M and wish they'd commit to it. I honestly suspect Microsoft is repackaging functionality that already existed for many years in their "ball of mud" software, with a shiny new wrapper and better defaults, but practically unusable, because people who license software are easily manipulated. Power Automate is the most awful example of this I've used so far. You say it's a competitor to Tableau, well, Tableau is a competitor to Qlikview, and I've used Qlikview and Excel enough to consider Excel better in every way that I care about. (My organization uses SharePoint, so that's how reports are usually distributed)

_delirium 5y ago

> And if you ask why it’s often because they couldn’t find the answer to their incredibly specific one-time only question, so they decided it’s all useless and they continue to work on their own personal homegrown BI-suite in excel. Hah this is probably me. The university I work for uses a BI tool (MicroStrategy) to track students/majors/etc. But I usually find it easier to use the BI tool primarily as a way to get a CSV or XLS export of enough source data to answer my question, and then do the actual analysis in Python+pandas. I can probably formulate my query in their weird proprietary query builder, but it seems unnecessarily complicated and I already know how to do data analysis in Python.

perl4ever 5y ago
>their weird proprietary query builder If you're talking about Power Query, the best way to use it is to write code directly once you observe what the interface generates. It's a rather nice kind-of-functional language that really comes into its own when you start using/creating higher order functions. Power Query gave me an intense craving for a form of SQL with a similar facility for functions. For example, I have a lot of experience writing Oracle SQL, and Power Query didn't offer "grouping sets". But I realized it could be implemented using functions. It would be so great if SQL supported that.

perl4ever 5y ago

>they continue to work on their own personal homegrown BI-suite in excel. Why aren't you providing your dashboards via Excel, then? What exactly does the fancy BI software do that Excel won't? I have used Qlikview but not Tableau or Informatica, and I'm a bit fuzzy on what people mean when they say "Power BI". Is using Power Query what you would call Power BI? Or does that mean using the data model stuff? Power Query is the part of Excel that I particularly like because data kind of stays where you put it.

edmundsauto 5y ago
PowerBI is kind of a MS Access for BI. It loads data from your warehouse and gives both visual builders and query interfaces to data. IE, it's a specific product name - the data viz tool from MS to accompany their other services.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  It seems to be part of Excel since 2016, no? It appears to me that it's morphed over time and I'm not sure to what extent it remains a separate product. I've used both DAX and M (Power Query) via recent versions of Excel. Obviously there are plenty of ways to interface with data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Pivot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Pivot says both Power Query and Power Pivot are part of Excel.
  - Rastonbury 5y ago
    It's a separate product, analogous/competitor to Tableau. Just go to the product page
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      I assume you're referring to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/ ? What I'm seeing there looks as though it is targeted at people who make the decision to buy products like this, but not to use them. I'm not seeing what couldn't be done with Excel 365 alone. There are screenshots with verbiage about how well it works with Excel. And they look like...Excel. I guess it supports R, and maybe makes it easier to seamlessly refresh a report. That's aggravating though, that it makes me suspect Excel might be purposely rough around the edges in order to not displace Power BI. As I've said a few times, I like M and wish they'd commit to it. I honestly suspect Microsoft is repackaging functionality that already existed for many years in their "ball of mud" software, with a shiny new wrapper and better defaults, but practically unusable, because people who license software are easily manipulated. Power Automate is the most awful example of this I've used so far. You say it's a competitor to Tableau, well, Tableau is a competitor to Qlikview, and I've used Qlikview and Excel enough to consider Excel better in every way that I care about. (My organization uses SharePoint, so that's how reports are usually distributed)