Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We have both deployments for Microsoft BI, cloud, and the on-premise.

We are using SAP BI and Microsoft BI to augment the other.

Overall Microsoft BI is meeting our needs.

In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility.

When you create tables in Microsoft BI, you have to create them separately. I can't have several reports packed together in one document, whereby I can have different tabs. You could have several pages of your dashboard, such as a summary page with all the detail. However, in the paginated reports, you don't have that kind of flexibility. This is a major area that Microsoft needs to work on.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately three years.

Microsoft BI is stable.

I have found Microsoft BI to be scalable. We did an enterprise-wide deployment and every one of the 500 people in the company uses it.

I have not needed to contact Microsoft or the local vendor.

We use SAP BI in parallel to Microsoft BI currently. Our plan is to replace the SAP BI with Power BI. The phase we are in now is to run both of them in parallel and see how everything is operating before we completely phase out SAP BI. The focus isn't on SAP or Power BI. It used to be our SAP BI solution. Since we started using Power BI, the plan is to actually discontinue SAP BI. maybe by next year we will no longer use the SAP BI.

I switched to Microsoft BI from SAP BI because, in my part of the world, it is becoming the most popular BI tool. Additionally, the ease of integration and our organization is a Microsoft shop. Everything is Microsoft, our databases, our ERP, and we use Microsoft dynamics and Business Center. 

The ease of integration of the BI tool is important for our organization. The scalability and then the licensing are good. If you choose the cloud for SAP BI, you have to spend more. The planning modules sometimes do not come with the package and you will need to spend on it.

It is not necessarily that Microsoft BI is better, but because there are other benefits when you consider Microsoft BI. The ease of integration with the DB and the ERP, and then you look at the overall cost.

The initial setup is simple to do.

We did the implementation ourselves. The solution does require maintenance.

The price of Microsoft BI is reasonable. Other solutions such as SAP Cloud are more expensive.

We pay annually for the license of the solution and we are using a premium license.

The choice of a BI tool is relative. If you have the capacity and the budget, you could decide to use SAP BI. There are other BI tools on the market. Why did we choose Microsoft BI is because of the nature of our business environment, the nature of your data, and many other factors that have to be considered.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of then.

In general Microsoft, BI is used to build dashboards, and the analyzing of data as well as some econometrics.

Primarily, it's all about visualization and dashboards. My organization is large, and I don't believe Power BI as a tool has changed or revamped the entire organization; rather, it assists us in creating dashboards. It made things easier. 

The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is its visualization and its ease of use.

I would like to see more visualization options. I have noticed that it's more driven by corporate data when you look at it. Because I work for the IMF, my data is slightly different, and the corporate solution does not always work.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for one year.

We are using the most recent version.

It can be deployed both on-premises and on the cloud.

Microsoft BI has been good. I don't believe I have any issues with the stability aspect of it yet.

Scalability is good; for the time being, it serves the purpose of what we are trying to achieve. However, we haven't attempted to scale it very much.

There should be more than a hundred users in our organization. I'm only referring to the people who develop and implement changes, whereas people who use the dashboards and view them on the entire URL on that page represent the entire organization. There are about 100 or 200 people who actually work and develop things.

For the time being, we are only using it for dashboards because we have other tools for analytics and other things.

I have not contacted technical support.

We work in such a way that we can use any tool and accomplish whatever we want. That's the way it works. I wouldn't be able to say that every team uses Power BI for the same purpose, but we have Power BI available to us and can use it however we see fit. I know that it is primarily used for dashboards at this point.

I installed my own personal version of it, and it appeared to be pretty straightforward.

We have a large IT team to update and maintain this solution.

In most cases, the setups are completed by our vendors. We only receive the finished product.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

Since we are a consulting company, our cases vary from customer to customer and from department to department, but mainly we have found two "standard" cases: Business users connecting to a DWH, or trying to consolidate several Excel workbooks to create business dashboards.

In the DWH cases, it is simpler since most of the data transformations and modeling are done by IT, but in the 'spreadsheet world', it becomes more complicated.

Users try to move from a huge table filled with numbers and "color-coded" cells to data visualizations, sometimes not even knowing how to write a simple Excel expression.

The biggest improvement comes from a "do it once, refresh many" concept. The users used to perform a lot of massaging on the data itself prior to the analysis phase. Now, they build their reports and refresh the data, so they have a lot more time to perform analysis, which is the real added value to the business.

Unlike other tools (like Tableau), getting to this point took a lot of resources in training, but when the users got there, it is a real time saver for them, allowing them to focus more on analysis, not on data manipulation.

I like the downloadable visualizations a lot. I think that they give the user a very nice starting point in creating awesome dashboards, with the right way to tell their data story.

Data Modeling is very simple and powerful for an experienced user, but I think it needs some improvement for the non-technical people. Besides this, it allows us to save a lot of time in data "massaging" prior to the analysis phase.

Reports are quite easy to build, even when some programming concepts are needed. Some users struggle with DAX a lot!

I think Power BI needs to focus more on the end-user (i.e. the business user). Solving things in DAX is not a nice approach to a user that has no knowledge of IT nor wants to get it.

Some kind of expression wizard, where the user can build a complex expression without any knowledge of DAX, can be a good addition to the product.

I see a lot of materials on how to go about doing things in Power BI, but Microsoft can add a "learning path". It would instruct users where to start, then what to learn next, etc, to sort out their learning journey.

I have been using Microsoft BI for ~four years.

It integrates better with other Microsoft products. It is very easy to use and has very powerful visualizations. It has also got a lot of development going on. 

It should have more integrations.

I have been using this solution for probably two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. I have a few large customers of this solution.

I don't have any experience with their support.

I also use Tableau. Tableau and Power BI are similar in terms of capability.

It was easy. It was done in minutes.

I can do it on my own. You would require external consultants or in-house experts.

Licensing is on a monthly basis, but I am not sure.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

Our primary use cases for this product are monitoring and reporting. I have some dashboards for the sales department and a little bit for operations. I'm going to create a new dashboard for marketing. 

What I like about Power BI compared to Tableau, for example, is that Tableau is mostly a visualization program, but Power BI is a more complete solution, because it has DAX, Power Query, and a presentation and graphic layer. So, I use it not only for reporting and graphic purposes on the frontend, but also for doing things like modeling. It is very flexible, a lot more flexible for than Tableau for what I need.

One of the things that I appreciate is that premium features that used to cost $5,000 per company per month recently became a lot more accessible. Microsoft recently implemented a per user feature in Power BI Premium; it's $20 per month. I'm investigating in that because I think the price is good. 

I would like to be able to use more predicting data science features without having to use R. If I were able to do most of the data science that I normally do inside Power BI without using R, I would decrease my use of R and mostly use Power BI. 

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for four and a half to five years. I have been using it since they created in basically. I started using it when it was Power Pivot in Excel and as soon as they created Power BI, I started using it. 

I recommend easing into Microsoft Power BI gradually. I started by creating models and graphics in Excel first. Then, when I learned a little bit about modeling, I started moving to Power BI and working there. 

So, I recommend starting with Excel and practicing there first. Power Pivot is the app that you can use in Excel for this kind of work. Before switching to Power BI, learn about data modeling and dashboarding in Power Pivot in Excel first. 

Before switching to Microsoft Power BI, I evaluated Tableau. It's a lot cheaper to use Power BI. The cost per user in Power BI is around $10 per month, while the cost per user for Tableau is a lot more expensive. That was a deciding factor for me. 

We use Microsoft BI on our portfolio management platform. We use live dashboards, in the public cloud.

We only use it for export and import, but that suits our purpose, along with the dashboards.

The upgrade process could be improved. Sometimes we miss information if we haven't kept up with the versions. It should be easy to migrate, but it does not provide enough information about what may be lost if you upgrade, especially if something goes wrong with the upgrade. Any current developments should be included in the upgrade so that it is a seamless process.

We have been using Microsoft BI for about 4 years. We use the latest version, and we have 4 users.

Very good. We don't have any issue regarding the stability of the solution.

The scalability is good.

You can find everything on their website. We rarely need to contact Microsoft directly, so I would rate Microsoft support for Microsoft BI as excellent.

Our setup is very straight forward and can be done in a matter of hours.

You have to know what you want to accomplish, meaning that you have to know why you are using the solution, what kind of information you want to show in that solution and the location of the data. I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

I am currently a management consultant and, before my current employment, I was a management consultant as well. I also had a stint with an online retailer in India. My usage with Power BI has been in the area of practical day-to-day operations, web host operations, and equipment status monitoring.

Two valuable most features are the ability to create columns and create measures.

The create measures feature offers you a little bit more flexibility. You can define what kind of measure you need using a formula, and the way Power BI works is very similar to Excel. In fact, most of the functions that you use in Excel are present in Power BI as well. When you create measures or columns, you just write the formula as you would in Excel, which will allow you to visualize that data in the way that you want.

In my opinion, the software is a little bit limited in terms of the flexibility it offers, with regard to the design of the visualization. By comparison, if you look at some other visualization tools, such as Tableau, for instance, the range of designs, or the range of graphics that you can create with Tableau is far greater than what you can do with Power BI. 

Of course, they do provide an option to download templates and use them, but every time, you have to go to the Power BI store, search for those templates, download them and then use them. I think it's a growing universe of visualizers that they have, so probably, they are also working on the same thing. I believe, in terms of the designs of the visualizations that the tool can create, there is some room for improvement.

One more aspect that needs improvement is the formatting of visualizations that we create. Formatting in this context is the colors or the font style or font sizes. The formatting options, I believe, could be made a bit more user-friendly than the way things are right now. It's a little hard to figure out where to go and how to change the formatting of a particular chart or graph. So, I think the formatting options could be made a little bit more user-friendly.

I have been using Power BI for more than three years.

Microsoft BI is definitely stable.

This product is scalable and in fact, I have worked on it with fairly large datasets. It also gives you the option of publishing onto a server. When the dashboard/report is published to the Power BI server, we get a link that can be shared with others in the organization. At the enterprise level, it is possible to give access to a list of users who will have a need to look at the report frequently. These users can just click on the link and view the report whenever they want to. It is also possible for them to use filters and interact with the report.

I am fairly comfortable with the tool and to this point, I really haven't felt the need to reach out to Microsoft with regard to the specific features of the tool. In case I do need some help on a particular feature, what I usually do is Google what I am trying to find and I get some links to the Microsoft community, or something similar, which answers my question.

To that extent, it has been very convenient to find help in whatever we are required to do with the software. The simple things are taken care of automatically. In case there is some trouble with the visualizations, you can always find help or assistance on the Microsoft community pages.

I have also worked with Tableau and I think that each of these tools has its advantages.

I believe the cost of the software plays a deciding factor in a company's decision to implement either of the two. While each product has its pros and cons, if you're looking for something that's more value for money, then I think Power BI is the better choice.

On the other hand, if you are willing to choose an expensive option that gives you a lot more flexibility, then I think that Tableau would be a better choice.

It ultimately depends on what you are going to use it for. If you're using it for a variety of visualizations that you want to create, Tableau will be a better choice. On the other hand, if people have budget constraints then Power BI will provide a good value for the money.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just download the software from their website, install it, and sign in.

This product offers good value for the money.

In a nutshell, I recommend this product and I would suggest implementing it. It has a very good range of features that it offers. For organizations starting on their business intelligence journey, I believe Power BI is a very good tool to start with. It's very user-friendly and it provides a graphical user interface where users can just drag and drop their required fields into particular templates of visualizations. It means that you get the charts quickly. There's no complex learning curve involved. From that perspective, I would say that it's definitely worth a try.

My biggest complaint is that it's a bit limited right now, in terms of the choice of visualizations it offers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is geospatial analysis.

This solution has provided an accurate analysis of our customers repurchasing the same plan for telecom Jio. It has provided customer purchase patterns and great visualization.

The most valuable features are the visualization and integration with Office365.

This solution needs integration with SAS and more deep analysis functionality.

I have been using Microsoft BI for five years.