5 Quick Ways To Speed Up Your Power BI Dashboard
Tags: Data Analysis, Power Bi, Data Science, Data Visualization, Dashboard

Power BI is a popular (sort of free) tool to create dashboards from your data. The drag and drop interface makes it quick and easy to build a simple dashboard from scratch. However, once things get more complicated and you keep adding widgets, your dashboard’s speed might get reduced to a crawling pace.

Even though there are many ways to improve your dashboard’s speed, I listed 5 quick fixes in this post that you may immediately apply to quickly improve performance without any drastic changes.

1. Use Integers Whenever Possible

Searching through rows of numbers is way faster than searching through strings. So whenever possible, make use of integers. For example, it would be better to use 0 / 1 values instead of “Yes/No”. Or 1/2/3 instead of “low/medium/high”. And pay attention, because a digit is not necessarily an integer. You could have 1/2/3 as values, but they can still be considered strings. So always check the data format in the query editor.

2. Remove Anything That Is Not Used

Don’t make your tables look like this, if there is no need to. (image source: http://sqlserverbi.blog)

Whether it’s tables, columns or rows, if you are not using it, it should not be in your dashboard. So during data (pre)-processing stick to what you need for your dashboard, everything else will only slow down performance.

3. Stick To The Default Power Bi Widgets

The Power BI market place.

The Power BI marketplace is a great resource for finding amazing widgets to present your insights. Even though sometimes you have no choice but to use them, I would advise you to stick to default widgets if you have the choice. If that fancy third-party widget looks slightly better, but slows down your dashboard, you should ask yourself the question if its worth implementing it. I’m not saying all marketplace widgets are slow, but some of the biggest speed improvements I made were by switching back to default slicers.

4. Use Tabs

Using tabs will not only improve performance, but will probably also decongest your dashboard. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the number of slicers, charts and cards on your dashboard, it might be wise to split them into themes/subtopics etc. and place them in different tabs. By connecting your filters over different tabs you can keep your slicers, making tab A filter tab B or vice versa. The dashboard will be faster AND better looking.

5. Use Top-N Rows In Tables

A big table can make the fastest dashboard crawl. Every time you use a slicer, the table will have to generate and display all the data in the dataset. For this reason, Microsoft added the convenient “top-n rows” feature. When activated, instead of showing the whole dataset, the table will limit itself to N rows. Again, a very simple intervention that will yield great improvement.

To Measure Is To Know

Power BI’s new feature: The performance analyzer.

Microsoft added a new feature in it’s latest (May 2019) Power BI update: the performance analyzer. This new tool lets you analyze the speed of your dashboard and will point out the bottlenecks. It works by recording your actions when using the dashboard and timing the load times for each widget. Once you stop the recording you get a nice overview (which you can export) with a loading duration for each widget.

Again, aside from these 5 quick ways to improve speed, there are many other options which you can find here. But before you start implementing the more drastic measures, I would advise you to try one of these 5 tips first.

About the author: My name is Bruno and I work as a data scientist with Dashmote, an AI technology scale-up headquartered in The Netherlands. Our goal is bridging the gap between images and data thanks to AI-based solutions.

Check out my other work on https://www.zhongtron.me.