Why Visual Calculations are a terrible idea!

In which Johnny introduces Visual Calculations and gives his opinion on whether they are a good idea or not.

#data #analytics #powerbi #pbi #visualcalculations

[PaulEBrownbill]

Excellent video with pros and cons of visual calculations. I definitely like them as it is a quick way of creating calculations. However, I do see the point about ongoing learning. Look forward to the next video. Paul .

[asjones]

The thing that got me excited about Visual Calcs was now I don't need to add a bunch of measures for One-Off type situations. Summing up some of our financial stuff we sometimes have to include/exclude stuff for both actuals and various budget types we have (calculate ... keep filters etc). That works well for a true DAX measure. However I hated having to make a new measure for every variance combination and % of variance etc. So the Visual Clalcs are perfect for that. Running sum also can be a pain and more a One-Off so useful.
I saw some posts that showed as the Visual Calcs only have context of the visual they actually run feaster so again another benefit.

[mwaltercpa]

The bait worked lol. Hopefully visual calcs serve as a tempting introduction to model DAX for the business excel crowd.

[heatherr]

I would like to see this idea expanded somewhat, to show the user (where possible) the DAX that actually goes into creating the new measure. With Quick Measures, there is some ability to learn what actually goes into creating a particular measure. But in this case, 'Running Total' isn't going to be available in standard DAX, the user can't get any clues on how to do this better.

That being said, if I might use this if I had a sufficiently difficult calculation to create to get to the number I need.

[elrevesyelderecho]

8:50 Agree with you. A quick solution that could create problems down the line. To be fair, this is another attempt from Microsoft to provide Pivot Tables out of Excel. Not sure why they don't develop a "custom visual" that run insert Excel inside PBI to generate Pivot Tables. Why not to have something like when you paste a chart/table from Excel to Power Point in PBI?

[hannesw.]

Having business logic in Visual Calcs would be really a bad idea. I agree on that.
But I understand Visual Calcs more as a helpful tool for things like running sums of predefined model measures.
For me the calculation for a running sum is much better placed in a visual than as another model measure.

[SergiyVakshul]

I don’t understand why visual calculations(VC) feature is believed to help those who have difficulties with DAX. To start working with VC one must create a measure in the first place. It’s impossible to start unless you have a DAX measure in a visual, which means unless you know DAX you cannot go any further. For me, the only reason to use VC would be to gain a noticeable performance boost. Actually, I still hope that when this feature is GA the performance of running total calculation will be good enough to think about using VC in production reports. Unfortunately, the performance VC demonstrates now is far from ideal.

[KerryKolosko]

Really interested to hear your opinion on this, but the background music is distracting :(

[MilhouseBS]

Title a bit of click-bait? I agree that self-service BI user is the intended audience for the feature.