Microsoft Power BI Insights: In-browser performance testing; Data modeling; Visual performance; Donut charts; GIF backgrounds

Microsoft Power BI pros share their insights on in-browser performance testing, data visualization misconceptions, performance with a large number of visuals, designing donut charts and adding GIF backgrounds.

In-browser Power BI performance testing

Across two installments of his blog, Chris Webb detailed how to conduct in-browser Power BI report testing. Often a report slows down only after users open and begin interacting with it. Sometimes this stems from unexpected Microsoft updates while in other cases, the browser may have a big role. Together with the network and client hardware, other factors include Power BI query caching, which can slow down subsequent filter and slicer operations.

In the second part of his blog, Webb set out to run an actual test, choosing Chrome and a report to test out. He opened a blank Power BI Desktop page, pulled the embed URL for the report page, created a new user report and ran the pages to populate the Power BI cache. Webb employed Chrome DevTools to conduct an audit and establish a baseline, peering behind the scenes with the Network tab. He wrote:

You'll see a lot of really interesting information on both the Audits tab and the Network tab and I’m sure most of you will be able to interpret what you see there and use it to tune your reports. I hesitated about mentioning the waterfall chart of the Network tab in this post but decided to do because I have found things on there that have helped me while performance tuning that I would not have found any other way. However, remember everything that you see on the waterfall chart in the Network tab is internal, undocumented and subject to change at any time.

A common Power BI misconception

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