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by vkb 3912 days ago
Having worked in some form BI for almost the entirety of my career now, there is not a single, consistent form of BI dashboard that is prevalent across any company. Every solution ends up being unique, because every company has a unique data set-up, stakeholders, definition of metrics, and access needs.

I've worked with Tableau, Domo, Oracle products, you name it. What's the solution that is passed around the most? Excel sheets, because they travel easily and have all-around permissions.

I've been waiting for an out-of-the-box solution that's at least relatively easy to leverage across different organizations, but I haven't seen a painless one yet.

I'm hopeful that Quicksight, while not the be-all end-all solution, provides an example for others to follow, if it does end up being easy to set up and use.

6 comments

I'm not really a BI guy by trade, though I've developed related skills over time. My expertise is in communications. Specifically responding to RFPs/RFIs/SOQs, and marketing collateral.

Whenever I see a program such as this, I'm definitely impressed.

Then, a little voice comes into my head, one from having spent years in the RFP and presentation trenches...

"Put this in a PowerPoint slide."

Point being, for internal use it's nice, but it may not be that different from what other software already does with proper data input (e.g. Excel).

I lead a team that develops a more advanced BI toolkit, that apart from supporting all typical BI scenarios, handles PPTX export very well (generating 50+ quarterly presentation for investors, etc.). If you're interested, drop us a line at www.binoclebi.com.
I work at Domo, in the team that covers the Bay Area. How long ago did you use the product?

We dogfood it obsessively internally. Have found it extremely frictionless on the sharing side.

Two ways to share:

1. For an internal use case, you can native "@-tag" any other user. https://www.domo.com/product/domobuzz

2. For an external sharing use-case, you can share a slideshow. Live example (fake data): https://modocorp.domo.com/link/rFgvIVi32QpwmthO

I use it regularly. It's not so much about sharing,which is easy and works well, but about getting data into Domo. Pain point to format data and schedule exports, update them, set up new exports, etc.
Got it. Is it a data-source you're pulling in from a connector, or from an on-prem system? We've recently added almost 100 self-serve connectors. https://www.domo.com/connectors

I've been talking to the product team a lot about related feedback lately. If you want to share your thoughts, I'd love to take them down, and make sure they get to the right folks.

Also, have you seen the new export API? It could solve part of the problem you mention. adam.chavez at domo

Just wanted to reemphasize sibling comment's petition for feedback on Domo. I work on the data pipeline team at Domo, and we love hearing ways to make the process simpler for our users. If you haven't already, be sure to ping adammichaelc with your use case and problems.
At Telemetry (https://www.telemetryapp.com) we're trying to solve this issue which is quite a bit more difficult than it initially seems. We're not a BI tool though, just a transmission, management and visualization layer.

Keeping dashboards persistently up and running on televisions, provision mobile devices with granular permissions and enterprise features like SSO. We provide an agent to integrate on the client side to help send metrics from whatever data source you may have. Take a look, I'd love to know your thoughts.

Excel also has a pretty easy to understand xml import,

At my a new gig I've just avoided having to write add 'just one more report' to the fragile homebrew report designer by letting people pull out structured data and make their own reports. Code required was trivial & the risk was super low as we could just use existing API methods to get the XML out.

This has caught my eye though, so I'll have a tinker in the morning.

I'd be interested to learn more about this, I've never heard of anyone importing XML into Excel before - typically "flat files" or SQL datasets are imported into an Excel table, upon which you can quickly build a pivot table, etc. Are you pulling in nested data?
I import nested XML into Excel all the time. You will need to create an XML Map first. Look under Excel/Developer/XML Source/XML Maps
yes, exactly that, drag an xml file into excel, choose "generate a schema", then you can drag and drop fields from your nested structure,

parent records will be repeated intelligently for nested sub-records.

Hi Vicki,

I'm the founder of Chartio.com here. Not sure if you've given us a look yet (or lately) but we pride ourselves on being as usable and flexible as possible. Would love to show you more: dave@chartio.com

Isn't that exactly what TM1 does?