Power BI Consultants Tips

Based on our Power BI consulting experience and knowledge there are numerous ways that you can quickly improve the performance of your Power BI dashboard's speed. Below are some quick steps and fixes that you can apply to improve your dashboard’s performance.

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Power BI is widely used for dashboards, reporting and visualisations that brings together your internal and external data sources. Once your dashboard reports become more sophisticated your dashboard's speed performance will begin to slow down and impact your end users' experiences.

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Step 1: If you are not using it then remove it

If an item is not being used in your Power BI dashboard then proceed by removing it. This includes removing any tables, their columns or rows to make your query and data processing faster and therefore improving your Power BI dashboard's performance. If it is not required by your dashboard then it will most likely be impacting your visualisation’s performance.

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Step2: Utilise the Standard Power Bi Widgets

Some of our greatest performance improvements achieved in Power BI dashboards has been by changing back to the default Power BI slicers. There are numerous and impressive Power BI widgets in the Power BI marketplace that you can deploy in your dashboard report but if it is possible, stick with the default Power BI widgets. The reason being that where third-party widgets can look impressive they can slow down the performance of your dashboard's report making the end user experience less enjoyable. A judgement call needs to be made as to if it is beneficial and required in using a third-party widget and weighing this up against the potential impact on performance.

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Step 3: Use Multiple Tabs

Where possible use tabs in your Power BI dashboard as this will allow for you to declutter your dashboard and therefore improve the performance of your dashboard. Simply put if you or your dashboard users perceive that your dashboard has too many charts, cards and slicers it will negatively impact their user experience as well as potentially reducing the uptake of your Power BI dashboard. By implementing multiple tabs that focus on different business questions or topics you will be improving your dashboard’s performance and therefore your end users’ experiences. This is achieved by connecting your filters across multiple tabs resulting in increased speed performance in your dashboard.

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Step 4: Reducing the Number of Rows in Tables

Large tables containing large volumes of data will obviously slow down your Power BI dashboard. This happens when ever you change a slicer value over a large table that results in significant processing overhead. The impacts on performance from these large data sets can be significantly improved using the ‘Top-N rows” functionality in Power BI. When "Top-N rows" is utilised your dashboard will not be returning the complete dataset and therefore limiting the dataset to only the “Top-N rows”, resulting in significant performance improvements.

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Step 5: Use Integers and Not Strings

Improving the speed performance of your Power BI dashboards is further enhanced by avoiding searching through strings and to instead search through integers. If possible rather than searching through a field that has either “Yes/No” values it would be more efficient to filter through “0/1” values and the same being true for other fields that have a limited number of values. Please take note that you need to ensure that the field value is set to an integer in your query data format and not string even though the values may appear as “0/1”.

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The above steps represent five different ways to quickly improve the speed of your Power BI dashboard before you begin investigating more complicated and resource intensive avenues in improving your Power BI’s speed performance.

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Contact us for any support you require on your Power BI requirements and how we can help with your dashboard BI reporting requirements.

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