Why is Power BI So Bad?
Power BI is often hailed as a top-tier business intelligence tool, but anyone who has spent an afternoon wrestling with it knows the reality can be frustrating. You downloaded it because it's a Microsoft product and it’s “free,” but now you’re bogged down in bizarre formulas and menus that feel more like a flight cockpit than a reporting tool. This article will break down the most common Power BI problems to show you that you're not alone in your struggles and explain why it's so often the wrong choice for agile marketing and sales teams.
The Steep, Never-Ending Learning Curve
One of the biggest disconnects with Power BI is the expectation versus reality. You expect something with the friendly familiarity of Excel but get a tool that demands a data scientist’s skillset. This isn't just a small hurdle, it’s a massive wall that turns many users away.
Welcome to DAX, You'll Be Here a While
At the heart of the frustration is DAX, or Data Analysis Expressions. It’s Power BI’s formula language, and it’s famously difficult to master. While it looks a bit like Excel formulas on the surface, its logic is rooted in complex database concepts like filter contexts and row contexts.
For example, to calculate a simple year-over-year sales total, you can’t just point to a few cells. You’ll need a formula like this:
Trying to make sense of CALCULATE and SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR can send you down a rabbit hole of T-SQL tutorials and forum posts. For marketers or sales managers who just want to know if their campaign worked, investing hours into learning a new coding language is an enormous distraction from their actual job.
And Don't Forget Power Query and M
Before you even get to DAX, you have to clean and shape your data in the Power Query Editor using a language called M. While the editor has a point-and-click interface, any non-standard transformation requires writing M code. Suddenly, what should have been a simple “if-then” column becomes a script-writing exercise. The need to learn not one, but two complex languages (DAX and M) feels like overkill for creating a simple dashboard.
The time investment is significant. Becoming proficient in Power BI can take dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of dedicated study. The existence of a massive industry for Power BI courses and certifications is proof enough that it's anything but beginner-friendly.
"But I Thought it was Free?" The Confusing Licensing Maze
Microsoft’s masterstroke was offering Power BI Desktop for free. It’s a powerful tool you can install on your machine to connect data sources and build impressive reports. The catch? The free version is almost useless if you work on a team.
The moment you need to do the most basic collaborative task - share a live, interactive report with a colleague - you hit a paywall. The entire framework is built to get you hooked on building reports before realizing teamwork costs money.
Understanding the Tiers
Power BI Desktop (Free): This is the standalone application for building reports. You can build whatever you want, but you can only share static files (like PDFs or .pbix files), which defeats the purpose of an interactive dashboard. Your colleague can't view your interactive creation unless they also have the desktop app and the same data source access.
Power BI Pro ($10 per user/month): This is the minimum requirement for effective collaboration. Anyone who needs to view or interact with a published report in the Power BI Service (the web version) needs a Pro license. For a team of five, that’s immediately $50/month. For a 20-person marketing department, it’s $200/month.
Power BI Premium ($20 per user/month, or ~$5,000/month for capacity): For larger organizations that need more data capacity, faster refresh rates, and the ability to share reports with unlicensed users. This quickly catapults Power BI into enterprise-level pricing.
This "freemium" model feels dishonest. You invest time and resources building out your analytics only to find you can't use them in a team setting without opening up the company wallet. For many smaller businesses and teams, this bait-and-switch leads to immediate frustration and adoption abandonment.
"This is So Slow" - The Performance Grinds to a Halt
If you're working with anything more than a small Excel file, you've likely encountered Power BI's frustrating performance issues. Dashboards take forever to load, and visuals spin and spin while you wait for a query to complete. This lag completely breaks your flow of analysis and turns quick data checks into a chore.
Large Datasets Bring it to its Knees
Power BI offers two primary ways to connect to data: Import and DirectQuery.
In Import mode, Power BI pulls a copy of your data into the report file. This is fast for smaller datasets, but if you have a few million rows from a Shopify store or event data from Google Analytics, your .pbix file size can swell to several gigabytes. Your PC's memory (RAM) becomes the bottleneck, and just opening or saving the file can take minutes.
In DirectQuery mode, Power BI leaves the data at its source and sends queries on the fly. This sounds great for large datasets, but the visual performance really suffers. Every slicer you click and every filter you apply sends a new query, resulting in that dreaded loading animation for each interaction.
Most users don’t understand these nuances, they just know their report is slow. This often happens because all report building is done on your local computer via Power BI Desktop. If your machine isn't a high-end powerhouse, your analysis experience will be painful before you ever even publish the report online.
A User Interface Only an Engineer Could Love
One of the most immediate frustrations with Power BI is its overwhelmingly cluttered user interface. While it borrows the ribbon menu from Microsoft Office, it’s packed with what feels like hundreds of buttons, panes, and tabs. Finding the one specific setting you need often feels like an impossible treasure hunt through Byzantine menus.
Death by a Thousand Clicks
Want to format a bar chart? You'll need to navigate the Visualizations pane, which contains dozens of accordion menus for the X-axis, Y-axis, data labels, plot area, title, background, and more. Each menu is filled with tiny toggles and dropdowns. Simple changes require an infuriating number of clicks.
Making matters worse, Microsoft releases updates for Power BI every single month. While new features are nice, these updates frequently change the UI, move settings, or rework menus. The workflow you painstakingly memorized a few months ago might be completely different today, forcing you to relearn basic tasks. The result is a user experience that feels unintuitive and actively hostile to anyone who isn't a full-time data analyst.
Collaboration That Puts Up a Fight
Far from fostering teamwork, collaboration in Power BI often feels like navigating a minefield of permissions, workspaces, and versioning issues. The system isn't built for the flexible, rapid nature of modern marketing and sales analytics.
Workspaces, Apps, and Sharing... Oh My!
To share a dashboard, you can't just send a link. First, you have to publish your report from the Desktop app to a "workspace" in the Power BI Service. Then, from the workspace, you can choose to share the report directly, or bundle it into an "App" to distribute to your team. As mentioned earlier, everyone involved needs at least a Pro license.
Managing permissions becomes a complex task for a system administrator. You have to assign roles (Admin, Member, Contributor, Viewer) within each workspace, each with different capabilities. The process is formal and rigid, contrasting sharply with the ease of sharing something like a Google Doc or Slack message.
Even worse is the disconnect between the creation environment (Desktop) and the consumption environment (Web service). You cannot build a report from scratch on the web interface. This means any small tweaks or heavy edits always require you download the file, open it in the desktop app, make the change, and then republish it - a clunky cycle that discourages quick, iterative improvements.
Final Thoughts
Power BI is an incredibly powerful enterprise-grade tool. However, for a huge percentage of marketing professionals, startup founders, and sales teams, its promised power is locked behind a set of obstacles: the punishing DAX learning curve, a deceptive pricing model, sluggish performance, a convoluted interface, and clunky collaboration features. It's a tool built for dedicated data analysts, but marketed to everyone else.
We’ve been in your shoes, wrestling with these manual reporting struggles, which is why we built an alternative that puts simplicity first. With Graphed , you create dashboards just by describing what you want to see in plain English. There’s no complex language like DAX to learn, you can connect to sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce in seconds and just ask questions. Best of all, your dashboards are live, shareable, and we handle all the tedious technical work in the background so you can spend your time on insights, not setup.