Power BI Desktop - Is it time to tear it down?

Introduction

It's December 2014, I'm at the tail end of my first contract, 3 months with British American Tobacco in London, building a set of Power BI proofs of concept. Now bear in mind back then Power BI was a set of Excel add-ins, Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, Power Maps, and the "service" which was based on Office 365 workspaces. 

And then just as my contract drew to a close, Microsoft dropped an unexpected  bombshell, Power BI Desktop arrived with a resounding thud. Now bear in mind I had spent the previous 12 months learning all about Power BI and collaborating along with other Microsoft Partners and experts and the Power BI engineers in a private Yammer site to contribute ideas on the products. So the sudden introduction of a completely new tool, new architecture, and whole new platform / direction kind of blew my mind. 

And to top all that, Power BI Desktop did actually very little as you would expect in a first preview release. I walked away for the next 17 months (my next contract was pure SQL work). I came back onto 100% Power BI development work, over 6 years ago and have been so ever since. 

Now roll forwards to 2023, by God the world has changed. No not war, famine, and pestilence, I mean Power BI Desktop; there have probably been somewhere in the region of 100 releases (maybe more when you consider many months have two), and now we find ourselves transitioning into the next iteration of the Power BI ecosystem, named Fabric. 

But throughout that time despite the many hundreds of features that have been added to Power BI Desktop, the odd re-skinning here and there, some shape-shifting of icons, the tool has essentially remained the same for years now; it has a report view, a table view, a model view, and the Power Query view.

What are the signs a tear-down is needed? 

If you buy a car or a house and keep adding bits to it over a period of years it starts to lose its focus, it becomes a little messy, things you want to add don't always have a natural place and so you begin to make compromises, "it's not perfect but it will do for now". And then one day you wake up and realise this thing you have so lovingly built is inefficient:

• Things are not where you expect them to be.
• You have to look in multiple places to find the things you need to perform a single task, when they should all be in the same place easily accessible.
• You keep fixing and rearranging things but the fundamentals are still the issue.

In the end the only logical conclusion is to start from scratch and redesign the whole thing to suit how your needs and workflow have changed and to better support your original vision.

Tear it down 

In my opinion, and it is just my opinion as a user of the tool for over 6 years, I believe Power BI Desktop has now reached that stage, it's time for a rethink and a rebuild. My thoughts are not just on the interface layout and workflow, but also architecturally there are flaws in the tool which are not aligned with the needs of modern developers and users alike. 

Interface

Anyone who has built a report in Power BI Desktop in the last 12 months will no doubt have stories to tell about how inefficient the interface has become:

• Finding context sensitive options that appear and disappear on the main ribbons depending on what you have currently selected has always been a gripe.
• The Visual settings have always confused me, now you can't even set anything until you drop a field onto the visual, all the formatting options are "unavailable".
• Once you add a field you are then presented with Visual and General tabs. Within those everything expands and contracts to reveal more settings, it becomes difficult to see the all the settings you want at the same time. The new On-Object Interaction preview seems to add to the confusion, I found myself switching it off after 5 minutes of trying it.
• There is a joke that did the rounds a few years ago where if you expand all the hidden vertical tabs (Selection, Sync Slicers, Performance Analyser etc) there is actually no room left on the screen to build the report, yet opening more than one of these is often necessary, and the inability to split the columns and dock them above and below means a lot of screen real-estate is wasted.
• And finally my biggest criticism of the Power BI Desktop interface is the single view paradigm. I would like to be able to see the report / data and model views all at the same time, or at least in different windows where I can alt-tab, split them across multiple physical screens etc; change things and see the result instantly without losing sight of the different components that contribute to that result. I cannot be alone in that viewpoint.

Architecture

Now I don’t claim to be an architectural expert, nor to have any deep insight into how Power BI Desktop is built, but I do know that is does not support the way I like to work when I am building a model or a report. I like to work in an offline manner. Make a number of changes and choose when to commit them to the model / report (yes naturally I use Tabular Editor). Any single change in Power BI Desktop is saved straight away as soon as you move onto the next change (except in the case of the recent ability to pause visuals, filters and slicers). 

While Power BI Desktop supports the use of 3rd party tools (an acceptance of the shortfalls in the tool) an area that is still unsupported is the ability to change the Power Query elements of a model in the 3rd party tools linked to Power BI Desktop. Once you save the changes using a 3rd party tool, Power BI Desktop simply overwrites them with the original code.

Conclusion

It is for these reasons that I believe the time has come for a rethink on the design of Power BI Desktop, and a rebuild to reorganise how the various functions are accessed to suit the workflow of both report builders and enterprise model developers. I have no issue with the functionality available and the overall capability and I wish to see that continue to grow at the same pace.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article and feel free to check out my other articles on Power BI.