LPT: If you find a faster way to do something at your work, keep it a secret from your manager.

I'll second that the Power Platform stuff is quite good for business, as long as you know its limits and how to finesse it to do what you want. I've been poking into Power Apps for some light business processes, make some things self-service, maybe replace other tools that we don't control with ones we do, that kind of thing, and there are some where limitations like the fact that you can't set up and print a multi-page form or download a PDF created using the built in PDF function (it has to be emailed or saved to the cloud somewhere).

When I started with Power BI I used a lot of the built in functions in Power Query to manipulate my data but that ended up being way to slow once the reports got big enough, now I do as much as possible in SQL before it ever hits PBI and the gains have been huge. I've helped folks save hours, even days of tedious number crunching and spreadsheet building in Excel with well-documented and learning resource rich tools, you really don't have to be a programmer to work with any of it, though having some idea of the basics does help.

/r/LifeProTips Thread Parent