[dudus]

As a long time Google sheets user I recently was involved in a project for one of these Excel heavy enterprises.

I proposed the CRUD solution to complement their use case but the solution was not received well. They couldn't allocate computer resources to host the solution within their infra easily. So they pushed back and asked us to develop some Excel add-on, PowerBI based dashboard or some kind of Microsoft no code I can't care enough to remember the name.

I had no experience with PowerBI at all. But had a lot of fun learning about it. Great ideas on that piece of software but ultimately it's too hard for Excel users and too finicky for real data processing other than very simple stuff.

It failed spectacularly in the end. We could never make it work reliably and the customer also skimped on the license and didn't want to add some extra features M$ft charges on the side such as power automate and some "advanced instances". Which meant the software runs have to be manually triggered on the managers machine to update the dashboards. It was nasty.

The end result is completely unmaintainable. A collection of "M" scripts inside a power bi dashboard, it pulled data from multiple spreadsheets from specific locations, joined and processed the data, and generated reports. The scripts runs on a Thinkpad so it needs to fit inside the machine constraints of memory and processing. Some of the files are manually updated so very easy to mess up the format or permissions to the point the whole thing broke.

It was a cool experience I'm never repeating

[steine65]

This mirrors my experience. I am the accounting manager responsible for updating these dashboards at my saas employer. Troubleshooting powerbi errors during month-end close is the most stress-inducing thing. And whenever management wants a dashboard edit, we have to somehow know that the spreadsheets being fed the powerbi cloud data will also change. Maybe an extra row inserted into the pivot table of ARR by product. Now any formulas directly referencing the cells rather than using XLOOKUP are pointing to the wrong product category. I was chewed out hard for that one a few days ago even though IT made that change, since it updated our report after review. TLDR: Powerbi suck, use a data warehouse and SQL for data transformations.