You build a really polished report in Microsoft Power BI nice visuals, clear trends, everything makes sense.

And the response?

“Yeah, this looks great… but can you just send me the Excel?”

If that sounds familiar, you’re not the only one.

In this session, we’ll explore why even well-designed reports fail at the final step user adoption. Especially in finance and data-heavy environments, the challenge is rarely the visuals themselves. It’s trust, auditability, established workflows, and the need to reconcile numbers.

Rather than focusing on “better visuals,” this session looks at how to design reports that work within those constraints.

You’ll see practical patterns for:

Make it easy to check the numbers
Instead of trying to remove the need for validation, design your report so people can quickly drill into the details and verify what they’re seeing.

Use visuals for the overview and tables for the details
It’s not about choosing one over the other. Visuals show what’s happening, tables show the underlying numbers and let people dig deeper.

Keep it simple, but focused
Don’t try to show everything. Focus on what actually matters—trends, comparisons, and anything that stands out.

Improve things without turning everything upside down
Build on what people already know, and introduce changes gradually so it feels like an upgrade, not a replacement.

This is not a session about making dashboards look better.
It’s about designing reports that are trusted, validated and actually used.