As all of you may know, or perhaps better phrased, as all of you may feel, there is an excitement and real potential for Power BI as an extremely useful tool. Perhaps, it is even the beginning of a new product that will be as successful or more successful than the Office Suite. Perhaps even Power BI could be the next Kiosk, tablet, phone, computer, laptop, Heads up display, etc. that gets embedded or installed on just as many devices in the world as Java.
Sharing data analytics on any data source and displaying it through a web based, cloud solution, accessible to anyone anywhere is certainly a great idea and Microsoft has already done a great job at all its efforts in Power BI up to this point. I also have a lot of faith and unwavering support for Power Bi's success.
So why am I so disappointed? Because I was excited when I saw that the January 2017 update allowed the wrapping of text in columns. This was much needed and a standard in just about any other reporting tool. In fact, I immediately upgraded and updated one of my reports. I could wrap the column headers with no problem. I did face issues trying to publish the report to Power BI and when the report finally did publish, I saw that it makes no difference at all in the online service. This new feature does not work in the Online service where almost everyone views reports.
I was again, extremely disappointed in the whole way Power BI as a team is making efforts to improve the Power BI product and continue to get customers to sign up. I can tell you from experience, as a consultant who recommends Microsoft Products and implements them, Power BI is not yet accepted in the Main Stream as a capable reporting tool because of issues just like this.
Does the Power BI team realize that they need to review the hundreds of other reporting tools out there and basic things like column wrapping are a no brainer? Are you Power BI, really satisfied with yourselves as a team? I am sure you take pride in this awesome product you have produced. That’s why you really need to ask yourselves, does text wrapping in a column really make the headline news of an analytical reporting tool? I mean seriously, that should be a small bullet point buried under the other Headers of MUCH more significant improvements than that. Just as a basic reporting tool, there are thousands of things missing that are standard and found in other solutions.
Microsoft, do you realize that before Power BI came out, companies were using other tools to capture and display their data. There are already decades of standard features built into these reporting tools from which Power BI should at least have a base starting point. Text column wrapping should have been in the first release of the tool. But again, I was very excited when this new feature was released.
Now, I don’t want to be all negative because as I have said, Power BI is a great solution. The Power BI team is on the very cutting edge of the next successful cloud solution that could potentially become an enterprise, small and medium company alike, standard rented cloud solution.
So, when Microsoft announces this "Great" new feature and then you realize well it doesn’t work in the actual Power BI service, I start to wonder, do the Power BI team's even talk to each other? How could the desktop development team make such a great improvement in the product and be thrown under the bus by the Power BI services team? Doesn't the Online service want to display this great new functionality that was the result of hard work from the BI desktop developers? What kind of culture at Microsoft fosters these types of miscommunication? Even more puzzling is why no one on the Power BI team realized this?
Power BI Team, I really want to say thank you for such a great product and excellent new release, but I am instead so disappointed. I share my disappointment in hopes that someone in Microsoft will make some real positive changes.
Something is seriously wrong when these types of issues are not communicated correctly within Microsoft and to its customers, .
Communicate these new enhancements as an Entire Power BI team, explain where new features work, where they don’t, does a desktop improvement mean that the online service will support it? How does the Desktop Tool improvements roll up into improvements of Power BI as a whole?
And if this was an un-expected result by Microsoft, then you have serious issues to deal with. The Power BI Team should have easily seen this issue and prevented yet another disappointment.