Doing Power BI The Right Way – for Enterprise Reporting

I’m a big fan of Power BI but that doesn’t mean that I’m not open to using different reporting and analytical tools in an enterprise modern data platform. People love Tableau with its long history as a leading visual dashboard and report design tool. Is Tableau an effective dashboarding and analytic reporting tool for a solution built using Microsoft Fabric? As I investigated this question for a new consulting client, my goal was to put aside any product prejudice I might have and approach the question with as little bias as possible.
The purpose of this article is not to compare Tableau to Power BI nor to expound on the strengths or perceived weaknesses of either product, but to share my experience and learnings about using Tableau with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI semantic models. I will demonstrate how to use Tableau with a Direct Lake semantic model, a large import mode semantic model and how effectively Tableau works securely with semantic model-based row-level security (RLS).