Today I was tasked to use power BI in order to create a dashboard which looked at mock data for a IT help desk. It proved to be an interesting challenge and it was really the first time that I had a chance to test out Power BI.
What I liked:
- Its very easy to make graphs on the dashboard rather than having separate sheets like tableau
- The grid layout is helpful for formatting
- The chart chooser section is quite useful and can produce more complex charts a lot easier and quickly than you could do with Tableau
- The Buttons are more interactive and useful than buttons in Tableau
- Making KPIs are a lot quicker and easier
What I Disliked:
- The formatting felt a lot more janky, and this could be because I am still unsure as to where to look, but it felt a lot slower
- There are certain things that are quite niche that you are unable to do easily, or at least to my understanding, for example having two fields on colour
- Making 'Calculated Fields' or new columns was a lot harder and I could not do this on the main page
I decided to make a presentation in order to put my thoughts into some structured format, and it ended up being a great idea as I was able to pick up on some things that I had previously missed out. I looked on Tableau Public as well as the PowerBI gallery to find inspiration of other IT help desk visualisations.
Overall, I liked the challenge which allowed me to explore this sofrtware, and despite still preferring other visualisation software, tt was fun to give PowerBI a go, and I look forward to improving these skills in the future.
Check it out here:
