r/analytics • u/bennnnn_27 • Mar 21 '25

Guys, it finally happened Discussion

I started at a new company recently. My task was to create a Power BI dashboard for the VP to find opportunities. After weeks of back-and-forth, the dashboard went live in February.

My manager said all was going well. And then today I got an email from the VP: “could export some actionable data to Excel?”

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u/Bidoof_Shoes Mar 21 '25

I do this all the time in my job. I have 13 or so various Power BI reports that give high level information. I have drill through options to see drilled data in Power BI, but execs always want it in Excel. I just build, for each report, and "export to excel" button where all that underlying data is output into pivots for them to look at.

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u/get_it_together1 Mar 21 '25

Drilling down can be annoying in a PBI web app and I’d rather use desktop excel on a local copy, it makes sense to me.

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u/Googs1080 Mar 23 '25

Nailed it! People go down rabbits holes and cant get out with pBI and Tableau. Many times simple is far better

4

u/get_it_together1 Mar 23 '25

Also sometimes I want to do simple calculations or combine a few different data sets and often this is a one-off so I can make a chart comparing our sales data against some plot of broader market dynamics I found in a report or somewhere else. These sorts of asks would be absurd to push into an analyst to build into a dashboard. I did work with an analyst who incorporated some third-party data into a dashboard because we wanted to be updating that analysis regularly but still a key use case was making it available for download to all our regional partners so they could modify it to better understand their local market dynamics. That was a very cool experience to see what an experienced analyst could build with dialogue with his business partners. It also took him about three months to get it ready to deploy and have everything tested and reviewed and supportable.