My current scenario:
I work for a small medical billing company that services drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers. The company owners decided to take a different approach to managing the data. Rather than using a billing software, we use Excel spreadsheets to track everything we do. Every claim we bill is typed out on an Excel spreadsheet.
I have no formal computer training and by all means I am an amatuer in the trade of managing data. Fortunately, I was given the opportunity to research what we can do as a company to understand the data we have. In the short amount of time I have spent on this, the most powerful and useful tool I have utilized is the Excel Pivot Table.
With Pivot Tables I have been able to design rich, valuable reports for my company. It's been an amazing experience (with lots of praise from the company owners). The success I have had with them and other Microsoft tools (diving into C# with Visual Studio and macros through VBA) has granted me a full-time Business Intelligence position.
As I continued to discover more about the world of data management/intelligence, I stumbled upon Power BI. By all means, it is great. The options available to get and manipulate data are impressive. I do, however, have an issue. I am sure that this issue has a solution so I want to present it here.
I am struggling with understanding how to best group dates in my basic reports. I don't have any files or examples to attach right now, but I can produce them if necessary. Referencing Excel Pivot Tables, they were easy and simple to use in regards to date grouping. Once I made sure my table had all of the dates in a column formatted correctly, I could easily group large date ranges by months and if there were multiple years, I could seperate those months by years easily. Furthermore, when displaying the data in a chart, the chart broke down the months and the year in a simple fashion and it was, for lack of a better word, super easy to get this done. Too easy.
Power BI seems to be a different case. I am struggling to complete simple tasks such as these. Manipulating and grouping date ranges has been very difficult for me so far. Difficult to the point that I am not comfortable in presenting what I have so far put together with Power BI to the company owners.
To be honest, I am actually not asking for an immediate answer to my solution (given that my statement is still so general that I don't even think there is an answer to be provided here). What I want to do is make a statment.
If anyone from Microsoft's development team is reading this: Make Power BI easier to use. In fact, make it as easy to use as your Excel Pivot Tables. As easy and as simple.
As of right now, I can imagine only people who are either intermediate or expert skill level in computer science can take full advantadge of Power BI. Excel's Pivot Tables are different. Any newbie who can change the background color of a cell in Excel can use Pivot Tables and use them well. If Power BI became as simple as Excel's Pivot Tables, it would be a truly amazing product.
As of right now, I can't use it. I am using my personal One Drive account to share Excel documents to the facility owners of the treatment centers we service. If I could use Power BI, I would be publishing reports directly to the web that they could see without having to look at a spreadsheet. I could even have them download the app and they could look at these reports on their phone.
Please consider what I am saying!
