Power BI External Tools: Reading the Tea Leaves

I’m in the midst of writing another post in the series: “Doing Power BI the Right Way” that I started last week. However, this topic is super important so I wanted to pause and spend just a few minutes to share some thoughts. Why is Microsoft (particularly, the Power BI product team) promoting the use of tools that they don’t develop nor officially support?

This week, Christian Wade from Microsoft announced on the Microsoft Power BI blog that a new ribbon “External Tools” was added to the preview features of Power BI Desktop in the July update. In earlier posts, Christian has promoted community developed tools such as Tabular Editor, DAX Studio and the ALM Toolkit that can be used as replacements or extensions to the Power BI development experience. These three tools are autmatically added to the ribbon by default if they are installed, but you can add your own applications by following the instructions in the this Microsoft document titled Using external tools in Power BI.

What are these three “promoted external tools”?

Tabular Editor is an open source application developed primarily by Daniel Otykier. The source code resides in GitHub where multiple community members have contributed to the project. Likewise, DAX Studio is an open source project headed up by Darren Gosbell. The ALM Toolkit for Power BI is an evolution of an earlier Visual Studio extension project from Christian Wade called the BISM Normalizer, used primarily to compare and merge changes between SSAS/AAS Tabular projects and databases. Working with MAQ Software, he evolved the code into a stand-alone application which is optimized for Power BI data models. Each of these tools are free and supported by the community but not officially supported by Microsoft.

There is an important message here

I use all three of these applications regularly. Before the new ribbon, I would open my PBIX file in Power BI Desktop so that the data model was loaded into memory. Then, I would open the needed utility application from the Windows program menu, and then connect to the Power BI data model using the local port address. The new ribbon conveniently allows me to open the installed application and automatically connect to the data model I have loaded. Honestly, it only saves a few steps but the presence of the new ribbon sends an important message.

What does that mean, exactly? Unlike many other vendors, Microsoft has a strong and thriving community who promote and support their products. Much of this is simply volunteerism backed by Microsoft’s MVP, Partner, user group and Certification programs. I typically don’t contact Microsoft product support unless I have a bona fide show-stopping error but I’m certain that if you were to open a support case and tell them that DAX Studio is acting up, they would send you to the GitHub repo and suggest that you chat with other community members.

I worked with a consulting client who had a large investment in database and BI tools from Oracle, IBM and MicroStrategy. As we got started on a Microsoft BI project, I IT operations that all of the developers would need to install and frequently update several software tools. Any software needed to be added to the list of corporate approved software which is referenced by the outsourced support helpdesk to remotely install software for an employee. For each application, we needed to provide the specific product version, licensing agreement and cost, service level agreement and support agreement with the software vendor. Software could only be installed from a network file share and not over the Internet. There was a form and a formal approval process that didn’t support my suggestion that open source tools by installed and that the free, officially-supported applications needed to be updated every month. Altering the approval process required multiple meetings and escalations to top-level leadership who had never heard of a vendor promoting “community-supported” development tools and entertaining such a strange notion was a big paradigm shift – but it is our reality and one of the reasons that Power BI is a successful platform.

External Tools: What Does This Mean?

Microsoft has several forums for product users and partners to make suggestions and to ask for new features. If you search Ideas.PowerBI.com, where any user can ask for new features, you will see many many requests to add IT/enterprise features to Power BI Desktop such as version control, multi-developer support, partitioning and other capabilities that already exist in Analysis Services projects. Adding all these things to Power BI Desktop would clutter the product and defeat the goal of keeping self-service model/report development simple. For the IT BI developer, we have Visual Studio extensions for data model and paginated report design but the process and overhead required to maintain those project templates and extensions for different versions of Visual Studio is complicated to say the least (see my previous post “I am done using Visual Studio for BI data model development“).

Bottom line

Community-supported development tools are an essential part of the BI development experience. These are necessary utilities to have in your toolbox if you are a serious BI developer. The Microsoft product team will not only tolerate them but rely on them, and promote these tools in features like the new External Tools ribbon so that we have best-of-breed tools to fill gaps as the platform continues to expand.