A few helpful tips I wish I’ve read before I started with Power BI.
Refresh before you publish, if you can.
For existing reports which you are changing, before you click on the publish button, remember that publishing a report means overriding the underlying dataset. So, first refresh the dataset in Power BI desktop, and then publish. If you don’t do that, your users will see old data. When the publish operation is done, the service immediacy starts a data refresh, but if it’s a big dataset, it could take a while. So just remember to refresh before you publish.
But…be careful if it’s a large dataset
An exception to the previous, if your Power BI desktop file nears the size of 1Gb, it may be wise not to refresh before publishing, because typically you add more data when you refresh. When a Power BI desktop file exceeds 1Gb, it cannot be published. If this is the case, do not refresh before publishing changes, but make sure you publish at a time when nearly no one uses your report.
As little logic in the model as possible
This may sound weird, but as powerful as Power BI and DAX can be for modelling, this power comes with a cost. If you create calculated columns and even calculated tables using DAX, you will end up having to repeat that logic across different datasets, and, while you may not plan to do so at the moment, migrating to another BI platform in the future will be a pain.
Instead, keep as much logic as you can in an underlying data mart or data warehouse. You’ll easily be able to use the underlying database for BI offerings outside Power BI, and it will be easy to maintain one version and one source of the truth that way.
Of course, in some cases you’ll still need to create calculated measures, just try and keep these cases to a minimum.
Use groups – don’t publish to your own workspace
While it’s easy and quick when you start, if you publish content to your own workspace(the default) and then share it,what happens if you leave the organisation at some point, or even changes roles?
Instead, it’s better to create group workspaces, even if the group includes just you at the beginning, and publish to the group.
Don’t forget to update a content pack after a report change
This has happened to me too many times. Someone requests a change to a report, you make the change and publish,ask them to check, but they insist they still see the old version. That’s because if you share content using content packs, after publishing a change, you need to update the content pack. Try to remember that. The good news is that after about 40 times of forgetting, you’ll probably be convinced to use a sticky note for that.
Hopefully that helps.
Ziv.
