Power BI is not just a BI platform and dashboard design platform; it’s a full business application platform. In this article, I did a deep dive into Power BI Tables with Inforiver, and was blown away by the results!
The team at Lumel has set the gold standard for integrating and extending the value of Power BI and Fabric with InfoRiver, Lumel BPM, and EPM for Fabric
Inforiver turns Power BI from “a dashboard tool” into a tabular reporting and planning powerhouse.” For teams considering or executing a migration, tabular reporting should no longer be a pain point.
Here’s a breakdown of some of my favorite features that I uncovered. Inforiver brings to the table some of the functions that blew us away, as we recommend not just moving to Power BI but how to deliver a superior solution for business information consumers…
Why Inforiver Matters: Especially for Tableau Teams
Inforiver isn’t just a visual plugin. It’s a structured reporting engine, a planning environment, a variance analysis tool, and a writeback-capable simulation layer inside Power BI.
After digging deeper into multiple demos and hands-on walkthroughs, I put it through its paces with our favorite dashboards.
1. A “Natural Pivot Table” Built Into Power BI
Inforiver behaves the way analysts naturally think:
- Drag-and-drop rows
- Instant reordering
- Intuitive grouping
- Easy detail/summary toggles
This gives Power BI a native-feeling, analyst-first table experience, so users are not exporting data into Excel to blend and merge reports.
2. Excel-Style Calculated Rows and Cell References
This is where Inforiver becomes magical:
- Click a cell
- Reference it in a formula
- Build calculations row-by-row
This level of cell-level modeling is something Tableau simply does not do. It effectively brings Excel logic, Power BI tables into governed, reusable reports.
3. A Fully Interactive Audit Log in Power BI Tables
This includes:
- Step-by-step history
- Comments
- Version transparency
- Change accountability
For enterprises with compliance or multi-analyst workflows, this is yet another reason enterprises consider Power BI in the first place.
4. Built-In Visualization Layer for Tables
You can drop bar charts inside the table without the clutter or awkward hacks:
- Bars ignore percentage fields automatically
- Groups can expand/collapse to show details
- Metrics can hide/minimize interactively
- Full control over row, column, and cell formatting.
- Conditional formatting!
This bridges the gap between a dashboard and a financial/operational report.
5. Formula Inputs + Table-Wide Automation
On the Data Inputs pane, you can write formulas that apply across the entire table. This is effectively Excel’s fill-down logic, but governed and consistent.
6. Simulation Columns (One of the Most Unique Capabilities)
This feature deserves special attention. You can add a simulation column, a slider-like control, which allows you to:
- Adjust a value
- Trigger recalculation
- Update the entire table dynamically
It turns a report into a scenario planning tool without leaving Power BI.
Why This Matters for Tableau-to-Power BI Migration
Tableau’s design philosophy has always been visual-first, not tabular-first. The reality, especially for financial decision making, is that tabular data still provides a superior solution when the objective is not storytelling or assimilating quantitative, descriptive statistics.
What blew me away was the extreme lengths the product team went to build the best tabular experience I have seen.
Speaking with information consumers every day, there is a demand for interactive, multi-level, structured reporting — especially for:
- Finance
- Revenue operations
- Sales performance
- Demand planning
- Portfolio reporting
- Forecasting
Power BI + Inforiver replaces and delivers exactly what customers want because the team behind it is long-time analytics practitioners who understand the pains the same way we do!.
This is strategically important during migration because:
- Tableau dashboards have no true built-in reporting layer — teams rely on extracts or Excel.
- Power BI gains a major advantage with tabular reporting that lives inside the same semantic model.
- Fabric extends this even further, enabling deeply integrated workflows across data engineering, shaping, modeling, and reporting.
The Big Picture: Power BI as a Full-Fledged Tabular Reporting Engine
Inforiver proves something many Tableau customers don’t realize yet:
Power BI isn’t just a dashboard or reporting tool you see on the surface.
It is the backbone of the next generation of enterprise data and analytics applications.
When you combine:
- Power BI’s semantic model
- Fabric’s unified data foundation
- Inforiver’s tabular, visualization, and writeback capabilities
You get a path that is dramatically more powerful.
Looking Forward: Beyond BI and Data Visualization
For Tableau customers moving full speed into the Power BI and Fabric ecosystem, Lumel is a vendor you want to work with. They have built a full-blown Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Suite in Microsoft Fabric.
If your Tableau team is consolidating BI and data delivery into Power BI and Fabric, you’re already in the right place! We are here to help not only move your Tableau dashboards to Power BI.
We are here to help introduce you to an entire ecosystem of best-of-breed solutions that await you!.
We are excited to be a part of that ecosystem and will cover Analytics + next!
