Skip to main content

Power BI

Needs Votes

Make Matrixes more like Excel Pivot Tables

Vote (3) Share
Anthony Guthrie's profile image

Anthony Guthrie on 23 Nov 2020 21:57:12

Power BI is great overall but has some really really really frustrating deficiencies. For example, I often need to view data values by month, where a product are in the rows, months are in the columns. Power BI requires you to sort by the total of all the given months, but I often want to sort by one of the months' data values (e.g. the last month) as opposed to the total of all of the months.

Excel Pivot Tables can do this, PBI cannot. Also, it is really annoying to not be able to sort by a data value that outside of the visualization. I realize you can bring in the metric and then hide it, except that in the month view, this then requires you to hide EVERY SINGLE MONTH worth of those values. Just to sort. Terrible.

Finally, an Excel Pivot Table allows you to put values above header or vice versa. So I could show all the units by month on one end and then all $ sales by month on the other. Power BI does not allow for that however and instead requires that units and $ sales clump together.

These sound minor perhaps but they are really annoying to have to work around. Please consider those of us that want to use Power BI for business and not have to export otherwise perfectly good charts just to sort......