Has anyone successfully migrated off a drag and drop viz tool to an open source tool like Observable?

I think a common use case from Tableau to open source is to drop the cost of Tableau. My biggest concern as a BI Engineer is the time spent building, code review, QA, etc. Using d3 seems like you can build a viz fast, but know that the viz will be displayed on a web page we would expect to follow the norm SWE cycle.

I would to heae you experiences on opinion on the subject

Hi all

I’m looking for a tool or process which I can track multiple processes that all interlink, I’m really struggling to put it all together in a single workable process or even find a tool for it.

For example A, B, C and D processes all interlink, some processes will be dependant on others before processing into the next step eg: A can complete step 1, but D can’t start their step 1 until A has completed step 2.

Difficult ask but I thought I’d put the question out since this group has always been amazing !

This may not be the right forum for this question, but I was looking for some help on SAP Webi if anyone has any throught or recommendations:

I would like to create a summary report which counts the number of students who have crossed a certain  threshold for the number of hours attended.

I would like to create a summary report which counts the number of students who have crossed a certain threshold for the number of hours attended.

(NOTE: I do not have access to edit the reporting universes)

Details include the follwing variables:

• calendar week
• student_identifier
• attendence_hours_running_sum: =RunningSum([Hours in attendance_19592]; ([student_identifier]))
• attendance_enrolled_flag: =If [attendance_hours_running_sum] >= 12 Then 1
• attendance_enrolled_count: =Count(If [attendance_enrolled_flag] = 1 Then [student_identifier])

The detail report is accurate, but the summary report by week returns 0s for all rows. What I would want is

Below is the detail table

Thanks

How best can i merge/join 7600 single pages into one single document? Internet based tools allow joining 200pages at a time. Any quick solution?

Hey! To those who have been in the BI track, how did you progress your career? I am currently 1 yr and 6 months as a BI dev and I don't see myself to be a people manager anytime soon.

I am more interested in ETL and creating DAX calculations side of BI rather than creating UI stuff (I hate bookmarks). I also took time to be quite competitive in SQL querying and python.

Here's my plan:

BI dev - Analytics Engineer - Data Engineer - Data Architect

Thoughts? For those who traversed the same path, how long did it take you to become Data Architect?

Thanks in advance.

I am trying to find a way to visualize a set of data and having some problems. The y-axis should represent the value a product yields (low to high), and x axis represents time, and I’m looking to capture the visual in a way to represent risk of inaction (non-production).

The set of data can be described as such:

• the business produces a small amount of niche products each year (minimum 0 maximum 6)
• the products, once produced, are immediately used to enhance business operations for a period of 1-10 years (value)
• the value of the product increases over time, and peaks at the 10 year mark, at which point it remains consistent (but has a high likelihood of being shelved, which is ok because it served its purpose)
• the products have a compounding value, where if multiple are produced in one year, there is a bonus to their initial return to the business (value)
• the value of a product at the n year mark cannot be replicated by products of a year of <n, so to say, a product at its 10 year mark, even if alone, provides value that outsizes several products at the 9 year mark

The business in question will not produce this product this year or next year, the earliest point it can be produced again is 2027. I need to capture the future risk of this decision. The business will incur risk based on the last two year’s inactivity, how do I show that?? Thanks in advance.

Products produced over last 10 years (and next 2), if someone wants to take a stab: -2026: 0 -2025: 0 -2024: 2 -2023: 7 (weird year) -2022: 2 -2021: 1 -2020: 3 -2019: 2 -2018: 4 -2017: 2 -2016: 3 -2015: 2

Thanks for any help!

I have been working in the field for 6 years (4 different companies) and every time is the same story.

You become the “data deliverer” and SQL monkey, but nobody gives a shit about your reports, as long as people can get their data in excel. Everybody wants to be “BI Experts” using VBA, thinking that they do better than you. Adios Data Governance, Single Source of Truth, etc. We have VBA! Hey! Lets just export in Excel 1 Milion Rows and use a VLookup to join an other table with millions of rows. Everybody wants to spend more time doing your job than theirs, thinking VBA is better than say, SQL / Python / R.

I have no problem with “being the SQL monkey”, as I like to work with SQL. And I love Power BI and creating reports with optimized user experience. However I am frustrated that in every company I end to spend 0% of my time doing EDA end deliver insights. And if I do, I know 100% nobody gives a s…

I tried to talk about data governance and single source of truth and before I could even start creating a concept, people changed topics or said that we have to work agile.

Have you got similar experiences? Any stories or tips to share? Is it normal in the industry? How do you deal with this kind of frustration while working in BI?

https://preview.redd.it/dbys0pvw4uzd1.png?width=1144&format=png&auto=webp&s=ca09d8e15764b131cd5ff393b8573ddd4273fca3

I'm a substation technician and have to make reports like the one in attached picture. I use MS Word and enter the required data manually for 20-30 pages have tables. I would like to know if there's a tool/solution use to automatically fill data from a source to the tables of each page. My use case is reports with only tables. I'm from STEM background, so have only a basic understanding of it tech but am willing to learn. Thanks & Regards

Hi, we'd like to offer interactive dashboards for our customers. Each project will be quite unique, we need a solution that allows us to

1. Create interactive dashboards (no-code UI would be ideal but its not a dealbreaker)
2. white-labeling
3. custom url
4. near real time, so the dashboard periodically checks for new entries and outputs
5. Our data currently lives in excel, but we're happy to change this
6. at any time we work with about 15 clients, and they need separate, password protected access to their individual dashboards (a data leak or the ability to see a competitors dashboard would be very bad for us)
7. we care a lot about the frontend UI/UX, currently we serve our clients their data using tableau, so we'd like something approaching it
8. we're a small company, so paying north of $10,000 per year would be out of budget, ideally we'd like a solution that fits under this price

Can you recommend some suitable embedded analytics services please?

Thanks

Hello, so I recently took a business analytics course and JMP was used a lot. The professor said he didn’t want to use R because some people don’t like programming, so he used JMP.

Do data scientists use JMP?

I like JMP but I think it’s a cheat code to getting a lot of the results from programming. I don’t think it’s bad, I just rather code up a project.

Custom connectors are the backbone of modern data-driven businesses, but the reality is, creating and maintaining them isn’t always easy or affordable. Every custom connection can involve complex coding, long development hours, and sometimes, significant financial investment.

Why does this matter? Because for many teams, the high costs of custom API connectors limit their ability to fully leverage data insights. Data should be accessible and actionable—but without efficient ways to integrate, businesses miss out on their full potential.

I’d love to hear from others who work with custom connectors! What challenges have you encountered? Have you found ways to streamline the process, or is it still a headache? Drop a comment and let’s share some insights!

Hi! Software engineer and data professional here. I've been working on all kinds of data over the last decade as a developer and as a data analyst/scientist. I've come a across a lot of great and bad tools. All of them have the table stakes implemented like import from well known databases.

Now, unstructured data such as excel and csv files stored in some bucket has been harder to use. The solution has always been one-off solutions to get the analysis done. This is not sustainable and leads to analysts shying away from these types of data.

I recently posted about the "worst part of BI". I got a lot of great feedback from professionals on what they didn't like in their daily job. The top two most mentioned pain points were

1. Having to work with highly unstructured data. This can be wrecked Excel sheets, pdfs, doc(x), ppt and schemaless json, csvs, etc. For ad hoc analysis, they could spend a lot of time just digging and combining data.
2. Working with stakeholders. Analysis they spent countless hours on could receive an 'ok' without any explanation of whether it was good or bad. It could even happen that expectations were changed from the order of the report to the delivery.

Now, I consider building a solution to one of these problems . However, I want to be certain that there's a market for either of these products.

I would really really appreciate it if you could drop your experienced based opinion. Especially if this is something you would like to use.

Welcome to the 'Entering & Transitioning into a Business Intelligence career' thread!

This thread is a sticky post meant for any questions about getting started, studying, or transitioning into the Business Intelligence field. You can find the archive of previous discussions here.

This includes questions around learning and transitioning such as:

• Learning resources (e.g., books, tutorials, videos)
• Traditional education (e.g., schools, degrees, electives)
• Career questions (e.g., resumes, applying, career prospects)
• Elementary questions (e.g., where to start, what next)

I ask everyone to please visit this thread often and sort by new.

Why do you think it was so bad? Is it always a leadership problem and strategy problem?

I am using Sigma to create a dashboard. I have limited access due to being a 3rd party.

I have several metrics to show, and most of them are a join of SFDC data objects, and are in fact the same objects.

Ie Opps + Accounts to measure pipeline, win rate, won opps, etc.

Question is, at the moment I can only see a way to create a new join for each metric / element meaning the back end data looks messy as there are several joins on the same objects so the join is being repeated several times. Is there a way to join the data once and pull several metrics from one joint dataset? Are there any drawbacks to this?

Thanks!

So I use to work at a consulting firm and now I’m working somewhere else. Today one of the clients I worked for on a project reached out and asked me if I was interested in doing some part time consulting for them. Now I’m gonna have to turn it down due to the lack of bandwidth. I’m busy with my own job and I got two kids I gotta deal with. However I was pretty flattered to say the least and I was just wondering if anyone ever experienced this where they did a side gig on top of their main gig.

I am curious as to whether anyone else feels anxiety around releasing a highly important data product/dashboard out of concern, that edge case data may be incorrect? If so, how have you overcome it!?

I am finding myself stuck in analysis paralysis trying to test the dashboard over and over even though it is probably as good as it can get. My organization is extremely complicated and constantly shifting, and I have had to code up A dashboard in Python/streamlit just to structure the data in a way that it can be reported on.

Throughout my career, I get questions from users (often leadership) about data in a dashboard. It might be something like “what are the key financial risks for X in Q1 of next year”. The answer to that question can generally be derived using a dashboard via filtering. For example, navigate to visual Y, filter on Q1, look at the % of financial spend related to Z and then based upon what you see in the data you can draw insights. Sometimes you may need to export the data to Excel to fine tune it. Then it ultimately might end up in a slide deck or presentation.

I’m wondering if this group thinks that this means the dashboarding/visuals aren’t insightful enough, and that a user should just see those key insights right in front of their face when they look at the dashboard.

I could take things a step further and create a view that more neatly presents this information, but often times the questions from leadership are pretty specific and one-off. If there’s something recurring, I’ll build it out. There’s also challenges with the user base, as leadership is often looking for conclusions/insights where other users (think financial analysts) are going to dig into the weeds.

Hi all, this might belong in a software engineering forum, but as a BI Analyst, I wanted to ask if anyone here has successfully moved beyond Power BI (or similar tools) for visualization and transitioned into code-based visualization.

I've been in my role for two years, and Power BI has served me well for creating dashboards and visualizations for stakeholders. I’ve become the company’s “go-to” Power BI guy and have implemented best practices, like using semantic models to streamline data integration. While I’m comfortable with Power BI, my main headache is Microsoft’s licensing costs (which I imagine applies to other similar tools as well).

Recently, I've been more involved in our company's data lake and storage projects, and I’m involved in backend ETL in our cloud (think “Data Engineer Lite”). My main weakpoint currently is frontend visualization. I'm exploring whether React/JavaScript might be the best place to start.

I'm familiar with Python, though it feels limited for frontend work. I’ve tried Flask and Django but feel learning JavaScript and React might be easier than finding workarounds with Python tools. Plus, I’m excited by the potential to share visuals directly with customers, avoiding Power Platform licensing altogether. Career-wise, I want to move into a more technical role, so investing in this learning path makes sense.

**TL;DR:** Has anyone here moved beyond Power BI/Tableau to visualize directly with code? Where did you start, and was it worth it? Any success or failure stories would be appreciated!

Hi All, it looks like Agentforce is already here. My company doesn't have it, but I'm curious at how effective the tie in is with Tableau and reporting in general. Thank you.

I’ve been tasked with building a KPI dashboard in Power BI for my management team, but I’m finding it challenging to make it both interactive and insightful. The main issue is creating custom KPIs with complex calculations that don’t seem to fit with the standard visuals. Does anyone have tips on building effective custom KPI dashboards? Should I focus on DAX measures, or are there custom visuals that might make this easier?

I work for a medium size organization who is in the process of moving our external facing 'customer portal' (for 3-4k customers) from a old school on prem SharePoint deployment w/ SSRS reports to SalesForce Experience Cloud.

I am responsible for designing and delivering a new BI/Reporting platform for this new customer portal that plays well with Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Few details to add complexity here:

• Security/access model lives within SF Experience Cloud for all users (Okta->SF User Entitlements)
• Very little to no data needed for the BI products to be delivered here lives in SF, it all lives within our databases either, its on prem or in cloud database (Azure)
• BI tool has to enable the following capabilities for our customers:
  • Interactive reports/dashboards
  • Dynamic Filtering
  • Agility to favorite
  • Subscriptions
  • Data Alert
  • Download summary data
  • Download PDP of report/dashboard
  • Create Custom Views (I question if this is necessary)
  • Create Custom Reports off published data sources (I question if this is necessary)

We have determined the OOTB SalesForce reports will not meet our customers needs; so then I feel that leaves me with either 1: Embedding a 3rd party tool into SF Experience Cloud or 2: Creating some custom solution.

I would prefer to avoid custom, so we have assessed SF/Tableau CRM, Power BI, and Tableau Cloud. We are currently a Tableau Cloud shop so my preference would be Tableau Cloud Embedded w/ the usage based pricing model but even then, Tableau is not the perfect solution and certainly not cheap. I don't believe PowerBI brings much more to the table different than Tableau; esp embedding into SF and SF CRM was ungodly expensive and limited compared to both of those tools.

Have others here successfully implemented a BI tool for 3-4k external customers within a Cloud based platform like SaleForce Experience Cloud? If so, what toolset did you choose and why? Also any other words of the wise or tips is greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

I have been working in BI for 8 years and I am looking to continue to grow my skill set. My career has been predominantly in distribution and I work in the wine and spirits industry at the moment. I would like to make an industry change to tech or banking in the future.

The skills below are what I use in my current day to day: -SQL -Python -Power BI -Microsoft Excel -PowerPoint

I am also working on a Masters in Statistics with a focus in Data Science.

Is there anything else I could start learning in the mean time?

Book recommendations are appreciated as well.

What is the worst part about working as an business intelligence analyst to you?

I've worked a bit on building dashboards and creating ad hoc analysis for decision takers. For me, getting my hands and consolidating data has been the hardest part. Analysis on analysis with varied usage and often it ends up in the analysis graveyard faster than it took to create it.

Okay first I'll start by saying I know $10/user/month is cheap and biting that bullet should be feasible for organizations looking to create and view reports to implement BI.

However, I've mostly led BI at smaller (50-500 employees) businesses, where $10/user/month would be fine if everyone was actively using reports. But an organization might not know how many people are going to be viewing them, and the people using dashboards can fluctuate based on the current business needs. At past jobs, this has led to me creating Power BI reports and helping management get set up with PBI desktop, then they just screenshot the visuals with the filters they want applied and use PowerPoint to show them to the team, their bosses, etc.

To me it's less of a cost problem, and more of a confusing report sharing and licensing structure. Now I'm providing analytics as a service to multiple companies, and one of the orgs I'm working with has about 20 employees who may use the dashboards and they want 2 TVs set up in their shop to showcase metrics from these dashboards. To offload some of the licensing and cost complexities, I've considered using PBI embedded ($736/month if you ran it all the time but you could turn off the azure instance outside work hours) inside my own web application to deliver reports to users at different businesses. Then companies could pay me a flat fee, everyone could view the reports whenever, and they might not have to deal with some of this headache.

Any thoughts on this? How smaller organizations could more efficiently manage licenses or how I could abstract away some of these complexities for clients?

Most dashboards you see in the wild today are static and read-only, limiting users to a handful of visuals and a few filters. This frustrates end users at all levels. When they need insights beyond what's shown, they’re stuck.

Even minor changes require raising ticket with a BI team, a drawn-out process that takes days if not weeks of back-and-forth.

No wonder dashboard adoption is low—Gartner even hosts talks on the issue. Data needs vary by role and individual, different groups require visibility at different levels.

The current fix is to create separate dashboards for each group, but this quickly leads to “dashboard hell”—endless bookmarks and dashboards you’re supposed to keep track of. Many of us know that struggle.

Imagine your own personalized view of the same dashboard (a lens), where you can tailor dashboard to meet your needs: add filters, rearrange visuals, hide irrelevant details, and generate contextual insights through conversation—all without tying up your BI team. Best of all, you can offer this dynamic experience directly within your apps.

If you're curious DM or comment. We will be glad to give you the sneak peak into what we're building.

Who in your organization owns and administrates the data lake?