I often find myself creating great dashboards and as i'm chugging along I'll have the dashboard almost perfect but then the brickwall always comes out of nowhere, the one small detail i need to add to make a dashboard work is not available. I try another dashboard with no luck. This happens a lot.

In addition, I've found that even the simplest of queries will crash a dashboard. I'm not sure what the underlying technology looks like but it seems like dashboards need to be rewritten from the ground up.

They're very limited.
They crash even under moderate demands.
They are slow to load.
They require very specific additional software (may be fixed in newer version).

All this puts us back to creating queries and exports and then just using the native robust functions of Excel to make up for the shortcomings. This isn't useful for the executive or non-data manager to go through all that training and effort just to see a simple at-a-glance real time snapshot of a particular set of data.

This just goes back to the overarching need I see expressed in most of these requests; make all fields available in all functions! What good is entering information into a database if a user isn't able to get that information back out in a useful way?

Thank you.