Power BI Weekly

Issue #321 - 19th August 2025

No announcements this week, just an introduction to the translytical task flow contest for you to showcase your examples of insight-to-action in your Power BI reports. No million-dollar prize money, sadly. But maybe some bragging rights amongst your colleagues! Elsewhere this week, on the technical side, Avi Singh has shared a useful tutorial on Visual Calc vs DAX in Power BI: Which One Should You Use? demonstrating the differences between the two approaches. Then, on the less technical side, but two complementary articles (IMHO), Kurt Buhler has written the article Five Minutes to Wow, talking about his journey into Power BI (via Tableau), the complexities around going from building quick and dirty reports to building enterprise reports, and where GenAI does and doesn't help (currently). Then I'd like to highlight an article written by Yugo Shimizu, translated (by Google) as Why aren't more users using Power BI correctly?. Yugo talks about the lack of understanding of what BI actually represents, the constant comparison to Excel and the problems that causes, the difficulty around actually "learning" Power BI enough to benefit from it at its fullest, and the over-reliance by some on AI. Well worth a read - just click the "translate" icon on your browser if you don't understand Japanese!