Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We use Power BI for a variety of applications, including retail analytics, sales, and process digitization. Except for time series data, we use it for everything. 

We have both deployment options open, so we have the requirements for both on-prem as well as on the cloud. 

One of the most valuable features of Power BI is the ease of use. It is comfortable and there is not a steep learning curve for this solution. If you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas, you can use this solution comfortably. 

Power BI's drillthrough feature could be improved. I didn't like drillthrough and those options much, but I did like it in MicroStrategy. 

As for additional features, I think Power BI could have better interactive features for the end user and scalable drillthrough options. 

I have one year of experience with Microsoft BI. 

Power BI is stable. I have not used it extensively, but from what I understand from my colleagues, it's stable. 

Power BI is scalable. In my organization, there are probably 400 or 500 companies using this solution. We are probably going to increase our usage. 

I have no idea whether the installation process was straightforward or not, on the admin side. As for the technical team required for deployment and maintenance, I would say you need maybe one or two admins. The development is based on use cases, but on average, I would say you need some 10 to 15 BI developers. 

We pay for licensing for Power BI. 

We are also using MicroStrategy. I did not like the drillthrough feature in Power BI, but I liked it in MicroStrategy. The way visualization works, I found that the interactiveness of MicroStrategy was better than Power BI. Similarly to Power BI, you can comfortably use MicroStrategy if you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas. 

I rate Power BI an eight out of ten. 

I would recommend Power BI to those considering using it, but would also recommend that they explore it themselves and understand their requirements. Their requirements will be different, so it's all use case based. 

The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution.

It is quite flexible for reporting purposes.

This solution is resource-heavy. I would like to see it consume fewer resources. When I use it on my laptop, it consumes a lot of resources.

I have used this solution within the last 12 months.

We are using the latest version.

It can scale easily.

We have more than 50 people who are using this solution in my company. Across the company, most are in marketing and finance.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

We use Oracle BI and Oracle OBIEE.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It would be better if the price was cheaper.

I would recommend this solution and suggest they use it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I have taught and mastered many desktop tools, including Power BI, for the purpose of prototyping designs for business intelligence and data warehousing. Currently, I am teaching data analytics at graduate level and Power BI is on my schedule.

We teach tools like Power BI by going through common scenarios in a business intelligence environment, which most often deal with the factual numerics that get designed into a sales force reporting dashboard or similar solution, showing details like order placement, orders shipped and paid for, etc. The templates for these typically use a style of diagramming called star schema, which is a common dimension modeling technique. 

I can't say whether it's the most frequent real-world use case that a real customer would focus on, but for the level of our tutorials, a sales scenario might involve a description of customers, products, locations, maybe geography, and the timing of sales for trends analysis.

Other than Power BI, I also teach AWS and Azure, where I help guide students to plan and come up with architecture for deploying to the cloud. It's not actually very hands-on, as it's more to help with architecture diagramming for the intentions that students have when using them. And at our institution, all of our courses last only four weeks, so it's very fast tracked, which sometimes means that we don't really go too in-depth.

AWS has a lot of samples and diagrams, including many graphics that are fairly artistically detailed. The level at which I've helped students reference those kinds of diagrams is mainly for their team projects, to illustrate their intention, for example, to deploy a database into AWS. If it's an SQL Server database, we usually choose Azure. But it's not to actually do it. It's rather to have the intention to, for illustration purposes.

I had a brilliant student in May last year, 2019, who did her graduate capstone project - where I was her advisor - using Power BI. And she has two times now responded to my invitation to be a guest speaker on that tool to classes such as the data analytics class that I've been teaching for about 20 times now, going back six years.

At my institution, I'm the only one teaching database design, whether undergrad or grad, and I found Power BI was a very attractive tool to introduce during the database design class, and then later enable the students to use it for their capstone. Unfortunately, it didn't work out in November this year, because few of the students picked up on it and gave the actual time it would take to focus their attention on using Power BI templates.

Overall, my observation is that the enrollment is way down and the students who are still in the program are very distracted, I think because of the pandemic. Despite this, Power BI has helped me introduce students to business intelligence and data analytics because it's a very attractive and cost-effective tool (there's no cost to it, it's free).

Another reason I'm inspired to focus my time on helping students with Power BI is because of the analyses done by the Gartner Group and Forrester Research, wherein they reviewed the strengths of Power BI. Both of them call it a "killer app". That caught my attention. And Power BI seems like the best thing to suggest to the students.

And I'm up to it on my side teaching through online, although I'm regretting that I cannot go on a campus to be still there for the students whose strong preference is to be together in a room learning on site. I hope that in the class in May, there'll be more people really interested in actually using it. In November, I was hoping some of the students would, but for reasons such as the pandemic, these online students have too many distractions. Especially if they're also still working or they have families with kids at home.

What Power BI is, is a whole collection of templates of small amounts of data that can be used to do something for a real world project, that can be easily set up and become the business intelligence environment or a data warehouse for a large amount of data, for a real world customer. That's what is remarkable. And that's what it takes.

It makes use of the ordinary things, and they'll sound familiar. Excel, Access, or SQL Server as the database, and the deployment techniques like Azure for it to be in the cloud.

It's very heavily like Microsoft promoting its own products, but I forgive it because this time it works. And I'm speaking from some experience; I worked in the data warehouse technology group at Oracle for three and a half years, and I was helping Oracle's clients put up a data warehouse with Oracle as the database, and to migrate data into the Oracle database. So that was my background. And for me to be persuaded that this collection of regular, already known, already used desktop tools could work just as well, but with the added value of the samples, the templates, frequent updates, and lots of support. That says a lot.

It also has other features that I like, especially regarding the designs in the set of templates for things that would perhaps be very puzzling to somebody doing it for themselves. It has pre-built tables to hold, during project lifestyle, maybe a small select amount of test data with the intention of the large amount of data going into production after deployment. And it has all the table designs that start out generic but that can be easily customized.

When it comes to improvement, I would say there could be more tutorials for students in universities who are just learning it. And it wouldn't have to be just for students in universities. It might also be for the people who use it in the real world.

The evidence that I see when I look into it is there's a lot of user group type of connections to the Power BI world. And many, many bloggers telling their stories and promoting themselves or small businesses promoting themselves to do it for you using Power BI. The claim being that they could help you get it done instead of you doing it yourself. That's what goes on in this industry. You see a lot of entrepreneurial people who want to work in the role of consultant and get paid for it. There's a lot of that.

And the invitation to look into the websites comes from little mini tutorials, which can be very helpful. But the next step of those tutorials, if most of the people get what they want out of them, is a contract to do the work. I don't want to introduce those kinds of things to my students, because it's kind of promoting something that could be a distraction.

I worked for years as an independent consultant. I even did a fairly long series of contracts up in the state of Washington at Microsoft and I had 38 years in the industry before I became an academic teacher. But I'm avant-garde when it comes to sales. I avoid salesman because I don't want to believe the hype. I don't want to be deceived. And I don't want to suggest that somebody go that way. The topic of sales is overdone. This is an opinion on my part.

On a practical note, the process of importing data into a new environment that has recently been designed is always a major effort. And Power BI has some weaknesses when it comes to loading data into an otherwise good concept and a good design because if it's not seriously tested and all shortcomings noticed beforehand, the importing process will fail.

Even a cool tool like Power BI cannot anticipate the complexity of the variety of sources of data. But they're not alone. That would not be a disqualifier. But because I don't have direct yet, hands-on, having done this, I don't really know how Microsoft would improve this area.

I think they've got it handled on integration. Everything that you're working with is already a Microsoft environment or a Microsoft tool. It's integrated. But if you're using the desktop tools by Microsoft and you need to deploy into a backend of Oracle, there might be some things that a smart consultant has to help out with. So cross-platform integration could use some improvement in terms of ease-of-use.

I have used Microsoft BI in my data analytics classes for a few years now. 

In an abstract sense, it's holding up. I don't speak to actual customers of Microsoft products to answer that question. But I would suggest that it's holding up because the Gartner Group put out another magic quadrant output that describes it as being in the leader category.

It's a well-respected research group, Gartner. In fact, companies that want to acquire its research for anything more specific or consulting, have to pay for it and have ownership. I don't pay for it. But there are many vendors who have my school email on their lists, so I get the reports for free, and I have my hands on quite a collection of the reports.

And that's why I'm mentioning them because the Gartner Group has mentioned Power BI twice now. So as far as long-term prospects go, I'd say Power BI is a stable solution.

Microsoft provides frequent updates and a lot of support for Power BI.

I have worked in the data warehouse technology group at Oracle for three and a half years, helping Oracle's clients deploy a data warehouse with Oracle as the database. But when Power BI came onto the scene, I was more and more persuaded to use it instead for business intelligence and data warehouse purposes. This was mainly because I enjoyed how easily Power BI builds on existing tools that I'm already familiar with like Excel and Access. 

The setup is straightforward, because it exhibits itself within familiar tools, like spreadsheets.

The complexity comes when you try to convert from simple beginnings into something that needs to eventually become reality. But I'm guessing. I don't know that it's complex. And anyway, I personally like complex. It attracts my attention.

For my primary use case, i.e. teaching students, the free version of Power BI is adequate.

May is the next time I'll be teaching the data analytics class, the graduate class, and I will be actively trying to promote Power BI for the team project.

I would rate Microsoft Power BI an eight out of ten. 

Its primary use case is for CIPs from the purchasing department. It performs perfectly. It is very quick and easy to use.

We approve it for use with SAP BI, so it has been more effective for our users and much cheaper. So, the costs are small and the benefits are high.

Its connection to every database: Whatever and wherever it is. 

It is easy to work with and very chic.

The look is simple, and could be a little more professional.

The stability is very good. We have no problems.

We receive an update every month with new functions, so we are not missing anything.

The scalability is good. It works for a large community just fine.

We have not needed to use technical support. We are able to do everything by ourselves. That is one of the main reasons that we like the product.

We have SAP BI working. It has cost us more than a million Euro, and it does not work. This was one of the reasons to change.

Power BI is very easy to use and much sleeker. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 30 minutes, and it runs perfectly.

I would recommend Power BI as the best working solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Usability of the solution.

• Enterprise reporting
• Enterprise BI
• Project reporting and BI
• Data integration
• Data collection
• Information management

• We are running over 500,000 report annually.
• It provides data feeds for enterprise KPI reporting.
• It provides data feeds for AI.

• Integration of DB and reporting
• Standardised SQL language
• Plenty of support
• Cloud options
• Continual improvement year-over-year

• The data source definition is all over the place. 
• It needs a wizard that covers all its options. 
• It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections.

With the out-of-the-box Data Platform and Business Intelligence ecosystem, you get the entire platform with a single license.

Previously, I was working for a retail company and when I got there, there weren't any analytics implemented yet.

So, what I did was, firstly, I implemented an EDW solution so as to gather all the possible data in a single repository.

After that, I developed a self-service model so the company could take advantage of their ad hoc analysis.

Then, I implemented some standard reports to understand some basic indicators, together with the delivery subscriptions so that all the organization's levels could receive this valuable information, i.e., for more than 500 users.

Lastly, I connected this platform to the cloud (Power BI) together with a top BI solution (QlikView) so as to take full advantage of the second data insights' step journey.

The Windows OS dependency needs to improve. There are some bugs with the new features that have released.

It is getting better but still, there are opportunity areas in some aspects, especially the Windows OS dependency.

I have used this solution for 10 years and still counting.

There were no stability issues.

Technical support is very good.

I was using Oracle before, we switched to Microsoft because Oracle is very expensive for the benefits that they offer.

The setup was easy, actually, a single instance installation can be installed by clicking next and next. Maybe a cluster installation could be a little more complex, but it is still easy.

This is one of the best out-of-the-box solutions on the market. Microsoft has to improve their Data Governance solution, but for a data platform and BI solution, it is very good.

We evaluated products such as Oracle, MySQL, and Postgres.

It is very straightforward. Maybe you won't like the Windows OS dependency, but, in the 2017 version, you can install the engine on Linux.

We use this solution for reporting around data migration.

BI provides us with strong computing power and calculations with quality visibility which helps with the whole pipeline.

I like having the ability to connect Excel files as data inputs.

BI also allows us to make functional dashboards, perform queries, and display data in various ways. And, there are always new features being released.

I would like for the next release to have better desktop performance, especially for big databases. Additionally, I would like to have more integrations with programs like Salesforce in order to get more live data coming in.

I have been using BI on and off for the past two years.

Stability is very good.

This solution is scalable.

I have not needed to contact support.

Originally, we were only using Excel, trying out different dashboards for the data. This was not powerful enough for us. It was not easy to use or streamline so we made the switch.

The initial setup was straightforward and deployment took about a week plus another few weeks to do work within the BI.

Our deployment was performed by our in-house team of one.

There is a free version of the Power BI which may be worth looking into for small teams prior to purchasing a license. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.