On Thursday, I have the opportunity to talk about parts of Power BI which reside outside of the Excel. I’ll be showing the some of the web components of Power BI and how to use them. Because the install base of the Power BI tenant is not nearly as high as the number of people who have used the Power BI components within Excel, this webinar will highlight the more exotic features. When I signed up to do this webinar, I planned to showcase forecasting and hindcasting as they are neat ways of visually showing predictive data analytics. Having used them before, I thought that demoing their capabilities once again would be a good way to show some of the neat reasons that you might want to use Power BI. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to demo these features.

Forecast Maintenance

Imagine my surprise when I saw this announcement from Microsoft stating that the Power BI Forecasting feature was “offline for maintenance”. Since the announcement came in December, I originally thought that this would be no big deal. Surely the feature would be back online soon. I thought wrong. The forecasting feature is gone. When using Power BI, the option never appears. It’s like it never existed.   In the excitement to release Designer, the non-excel dash boarding feature, the disappearance of the previously released tool has not been highlighted, until now.

The Dark Cloud of Iterative Releases

When the Forecasting feature was released in May, there was a lot of buzz about the fact that Microsoft was able to release a great new feature in time to coincide with the PASS BA Conference. Well, the pulling of this feature is the Nimbostratus of the cloud release, bringing rain. There are a lot of features available for me to show in Power BI, so I still have a lot of demo material, but I find this development to be rather troubling. Here’s hoping that this giving and taking of features in Power BI doesn’t repeat itself.

Yours Always

Ginger Grant

Data aficionado et SQL Raconteur