Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I've been using it for financial data.

Flexibility and usefulness of the data.

Trend data and dashboards need improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for some time. 

The stability is a seven out of ten. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Across retail, logistics, legal, finance, and more, I use Power BI to craft custom solutions. From analyzing sales to optimizing operations, Power BI helps me extract actionable insights for informed decision-making across diverse industries.

I'm working with a law firm that has hundreds of professionals working across various areas for different clients. They struggle to accurately track hours worked per client and compare profitability. With Power BI, I can integrate data from their ERP systems and create insightful reports. These reports not only show the hours worked per client but also compare profitability between clients and highlight KPIs. By providing clear and actionable insights, Power BI helps the firm make informed decisions quickly, leading to improved profitability and efficiency.

The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs. By offering a range of visualization options and customization capabilities, Power BI enables users to quickly analyze data and gain actionable insights. Depending on the preferences and requirements of the customer, different visualization styles can be utilized, from simple and standardized views to more colorful and dynamic charts and graphs.

Areas of Power BI that could be improved are the learning curve for developers who come from non-technical backgrounds. While Power BI is a powerful tool, mastering its development aspects, including coding and formulas, can be challenging for those without a technical background. Additionally, some users find the default visualizations in Power BI Desktop to be outdated and prefer more modern and customizable options. 

One additional feature I would like to see in Power BI is tighter integration with Power Apps. This would allow for easier development without extensive coding, making it more accessible for users who aren't familiar with technical aspects like JSON files or Visual Studio Code. Simplifying the development process would streamline workflow and enhance overall usability.

I have been working with Microsoft Power BI since 2016.

I would rate the stability of Power BI at around nine out of ten. It has been consistently reliable over the past year, and any bugs are quickly addressed by a supportive community.

Power BI is scalable, but its scalability depends on factors like the amount of data, infrastructure, and database type. For large BI data, other tools might be more suitable. However, Power BI offers great flexibility, and its scalability varies based on specific needs and circumstances.

The technical support for Power BI is generally good, but it can be limited in handling diverse customer needs. While Microsoft technicians are highly knowledgeable, they may provide standard solutions based on their expertise, which might not cover all possible scenarios. Finding solutions often requires additional research, practice, and exploration of community resources. Overall, I would rate the support at a nine out of ten.

Positive

Deploying Power BI isn't difficult, but it requires time and experience. With regular updates and new features from Microsoft, staying current and understanding changes can be a continuous learning process. While it is manageable with experience, teaching someone from scratch would require significant time and effort.

The price of Power BI is very good. It is reasonable.

Power BI has revolutionized our reporting and decision-making processes. Instead of spending hours manually working with static data in Excel, we now have dynamic information at our fingertips. With Power BI, we can quickly make queries, access answers, and generate reports in minutes. By efficiently extracting data from databases and creating visually appealing visuals, such as KPI dashboards, Power BI enables us to identify trends, compare data, and make informed decisions promptly. It streamlines the entire process, from data extraction to visualization, saving us time and providing valuable insights for effective decision-making.

My advice for someone looking to use Power BI would be to start with the Pro license, as it is usually sufficient for most users. If you are dealing with a large number of customers, consider consulting with a Microsoft partner to find the best licensing solution. Based on my experience, I would recommend Power BI to others. Overall, I would rate the product as a nine out of ten.

We use Microsoft BI all over our enterprise but our main use is for the organizational dashboard. My organization sends all of our systems and ERP data into a Power BI dashboard, which goes to all the managers, the leadership, and then gets reported up to the company executives.

Microsoft BI has helped out the organization because it has brought visibility of our data across the organization allowing everyone to see the same metrics.

My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations.

Microsoft BI could improve by having better collaboration between developers working on the same dashboard. The developer platform is all done on a single laptop and it's difficult to have the same project files work. Two developers have to go back and forth. You have to have the project file on one developer's laptop making it difficult to co-develop.

In terms of the performance, it could always improve sometimes. It's only slow to update. The automated data feeds have to be all updated.

I have been using Microsoft BI for two years.

The stability of Microsoft BI is very good. We have not had an issue.

Microsoft BI has scaled very well for us. We have a very large organization with users all across the company.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution. It's a standard program for analysts and even managers will use it. It is a standard business analyst software. 

The solution is extensively being used in our organization.

I have not contacted Mircosoft for technical support. I only use our internal support.

We previously used SAS and it is similar to Microsoft BI. It's a little different in the visualization. It was more on analytics, but it also had the visualization.

We had SAS Enterprise Guide which was on-premise. When they were looking at cloud solutions, they kind of opened it up for more possibilities. The deciding factors of why we switched to Microsoft BI was we already had many Microsoft products and we have a SQL Server Data Warehouse. There's good integration between our existing Microsoft systems with Microsoft BI.

I was part of the initial user testing of Microsoft BI, but it was mostly IT that handled all the initial implementation.

We have a dedicated IT team of two administrators that support Microsoft BI. One of the administrator's full-time job is to manage the Microsoft BI.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is to do some training. There is enough training curriculum available to get people going.

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

I'm a project manager and we are customers of Microsoft.

I like the toggling feature, the ability to switch from one page to another. 

I have a couple of dashboards that are weekly and monthly. I was able to download the dashboard, but I cannot paste any images into PowerPoint. There are also visuals based on the brand that should automatically pop up in the graph and which should be a toggling option. And I'm having performance issues if I want to add two or three tables at a time, which I could easily do in Tableau. Copy-pasting data to PowerPoint for presentation to the executive level should be easy but we're only able to copy the visual, not the underlying data. 

I've been using this solution for the past eight months. 

The solution is scalable but we haven't yet migrated everyone to Power BI. Our users are not finding Power BI as good as Pique, which perhaps they're just more used to. They're trying but some of the features available in Pique are not there so they are not comprehensively using it. It's being used mainly for internal analysis for now. 

We initially used Tableau because our data was an internal data source, and now all of our data is migrated to tool environments, that the Power BI is more comfortable with. BI is also a free product which is another reason the company recommends it.

The initial setup was straightforward, we have a Power BI admin team who take care of all that. 

Because of performance issues and because we're unable to do all the aggregation, I rate this solution six out of 10. 

We use it to create dashboards. We input our data and visualize it as dashboards.

While it hasn't significantly enhanced collaboration, it has greatly improved our reporting capabilities. It allows us to present visually appealing dashboards to management.

Our main focus with Power BI is dashboarding rather than collaboration.

Power BI makes it easy to visualize our data through dashboards. It is quite dynamic. We can easily modify views based on our requirements, which helps us see the data more clearly and makes it visually appealing for management.

Moreover, the integration of Power BI with other Microsoft products is quite easy. 

There are certain features that are only available in the cloud version. It would be beneficial if they could be brought down to the on-premise version without the necessity of using the enterprise SQL database, as that can be very costly. We need more cost-effective features that are available in the cloud to be accessible on-premise.

We've been using Microsoft Power BI for about three years now.

It is a stable product for me. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. There are less than ten end users in my company using this solution. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The customer service and support are okay.

Positive

We're essentially a Microsoft house. We use a wide range of Microsoft products and are very happy with them. So far, we have no plans to switch, as we haven't found alternatives for essentials like Office or Windows.

Azure DevOps is something we're starting to explore to enhance our desktops. We also work with Microsoft Dynamics, DPM, Hyper-V, and Microsoft Exchange.

Cost was a decisive factor when opting for Power BI. 

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy to set up. 

The deployment process took one to two days. 

I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive. 

I would recommend it, especially the Pro or Premium versions. They are better.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I largely work with the engineering and R&D teams. Typically, the data insights and data teams use Power BI for business-related data visualization. However, for me and my customers, most of the tools like Power BI and Tableau are used to do data visualization for the engineering data. That could be even predicting the behavior of a machine, meantime between failure, or tracking of an IoT center data or even the behavior of the fleet management and things like that. In all the engineering use cases where we need data visualization, we use this product.

We have 16,000 to 17,000 or more people who are trained in insights and data. This group uses all the data analytics tools, data visualization tools, BI tools, and all the other tools from a business use cases perspective. It could be market basket analysis, sales reports, and all those kinds of other business reporting.

The solution has been stable.

We've found that the scalability meets our current needs.

It's good for data visualization and analysis. 

My understanding is that the initial setup is pretty easy.

Technical support has always been great for us, as strategic partners. 

There could be more scalability.

Microsoft should offer additional features for visualization and have additional features for slicing and dicing that data. Those would be good to have.

We've been using the solution since Microsoft introduced the solution to the market.

The product is more or less stable. Power BI doesn't have any problem with the stability aspect.

The solution can scale. It meets our needs.

We are dedicated partners. We have a couple of Microsoft architects that are dedicated to us. We have fairly decent support. I don't have any problem with them. If you ask a commercial end-user what kind of Microsoft support they get, in that case, you might get a disappointing answer. For us, we are satisfied.

I work with a services company and we work with a lot of different customers. So depending on which customer, what is that ecosystem, we'll end up using a lot of different BI tools. That includes both licensed and open-sourced software as well. For example, we've used Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.

I am personally not involved in the implementation process, however, my understanding is it's not that difficult to set up.

I don't oversee day-to-day operations. I just have a team that does that for me.

I cannot speak to the exact pricing. Sometimes we, for example, resell some licenses. We are strategic partners with Microsoft. It entirely depends on how the contract with the customers is. Sometimes the customer procures all the licenses and gives them to us and sometimes we resell the licenses. It completely varies from customer to customer.

We have a strategic partnership with Microsoft and a lot of our customers also are Microsoft shops.

We use both cloud and on-prem deployments. It's a mixed kind of a situation, depending on the customer scenario and situation. We have some implementations that are on the cloud and there are some older installations, legacy installations, which are on-prem. That is also giving us an opportunity to move them to the cloud. Most of our customers are looking to move to the cloud slowly and gradually. I anticipate that we will be seeing more cloud-based installations going forward.

There are one-off scenarios where the customer has an interesting mix of cloud platforms. They might have an IoT platform that is deployed on AWS, and that data is coming to the data lake and being visualized using Power BI, however, not necessarily on Azure.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. 

Currently, it is used in our financial reporting and financial consideration reports.

It is stable.

It has good functionality and is fully integrated with Microsoft products. If you have already a direct connection or direct integration with Microsoft products, it is very good actually. In some cases, we just developed our BI dashboard and sent it to PowerPoint, for example. It'll be published as the power BI format, which is very good as a feature, to have that capability to just easily populate everything in PowerPoint.

Like all Microsoft products, it is very easy to set up initially.

It's pretty user-friendly.

The product can scale.

Our main concern with Power BI is it doesn't have a connection with the finance application. Power BI is used to present some financial data. However, if there is no direct connection or a ready API to be connected either to Oracle ERP or SAP or a different ERP, it won't be very useful. We need more integration capabilities. 

We've been using the solution for five years. 

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The scalability has been great. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

In my organization, there are about 10 to 20 users. The majority have shifted to Qlick.

I haven't contacted technical support in the past. The product has been so stable we haven't needed assistance. 

We have multiple BI tools. We previously worked with Oracle BI. Our expectations were not met, and therefore we moved over to Microsoft BI.

In my sector, currently, we are using Qlik Sense. We started using it one year ago.

We are shifting from Microsoft to Qlik due to the fact that we have Oracle ERP as a back end. We are trying to find a technology or BI, which already has a direct connection with this ERP. We went into Qlik Sense for that reason.

The initial setup is straightforward, actually. It is like any other Microsoft product. All of Microsoft's products are straightforward. It isn't complicated. This is one of the main benefits.

I'm not sure how long the deployment process was. I can't speak to how big the technical team was that handled the rollout.

We pay an annual licensing fee. 

I would recommend the solution if they already have a Microsoft ERP system. If they have already Microsoft and they have already their financial system in place and if they don't have data movement, Power BI will be very powerful. If a company has different financial systems, they have to track all these data points first, build the business model and then import it to Power BI. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Microsoft BI can be useful for several scenarios, depending on your end audience, or what they're looking for. Depending on your creativity, imagination, and what the tool allows you to build, you can create a lot of cool things with it. You can build a lot of very elaborate and dynamic reports for example. The most important thing to consider is to understand what your audience is looking for. The development side of the tool is not the problem.

The usability of the tool is very simple. If you know the basics, it's fine. Even if you don't have the basics, there is a lot of self-service documentation available which helps to guide the user to start to use the tool, and how to navigate through it. 

There was also a new feature added last month to help new users practice using the system by providing an example data set to experiment with. Power BI server can be run on-premise so that your reports are available locally. Or you can have a premium version, including all your reports on the Cloud. It can be determined by the number of refreshes required from the reports or can depend on the volume of users that are consuming the reports.

The tool is very flexible so it allows for creativity. Power BI allows you to incorporate Microsoft Visio diagrams and other graphics from Microsoft tools. You can also integrate third-party visual graphics created from other tools, such as R or Python. It is useful to be able to obtain additional charts or different types of graphics developed by a third-party tool. This gives you more options for your end solutions. However, for some third-party tools and graphics such as Zoom charts, you have to pay for those separately. This is useful if you really wish to mesmerize your audience with dynamic, interactive visuals.

Alternatively, if you just want to use what is available to you, and with a little bit of UX/UI knowledge and creativity, you can build really cool stuff with it. For example, you can have dynamic dashboards on a screen that is connected in real-time. Users can interact directly with the data, so when they click the mouse, they can see the data changing. There's a lot of things that you can do with it. Let's say you develop a report, to put on a big touchable screen. Let's say the CEO is presenting to someone, and he's on a big screen. As soon as he touches a dialogue or a graphic on the screen, all the data changes. 

As an example, in CNN news, or any news, where they are presenting, and there are some dashboards and reports, journalist clicks on the screen, and everything changes instantly. That's what Power BI can do. If you have touch screens Power BI allows you to interact with your data.

I think that the product would benefit by increasing the range of visuals and graphics readily available, as opposed to using a third party included as part of the product. One way they could do that is for Microsoft to buy some of those third party companies, as they are specialists in visual creation, and they are making money from that. However, I understand that perhaps Microsoft maybe doesn't want to invest in that side of the business. Perhaps it is a financial decision. I would say that if we can have those additional visuals built into the product, it will be great. Alternatively, in the future, there should be an additional tool there that allows you to create your own visuals. That will give users more flexibility. 

It would also be useful for users with little experience in coding, or other Microsoft tools such as Excel. For example, let's say, you are a random user, and you're just looking at the computer for the first time. You open Power BI, but you know you can go to an Excel file and connect to that Excel file from Power BI. This is very simple and intuitive. So, once you have connected to the data, you can see your fields on the right-hand side, and all you need to do then is to drag and drop the fields you need. You can then select a relevant visual or graphic, and put the information alongside that visual, and then you have the visual and the data created as one item. This is very useful and dynamic. This would also have the other huge advantage, in that it would be a cheaper solution to use. I would like the ability to reuse connections. 

For example, if I created a connection to an SQL server, and I published my report using that connection, and then shared my report, it would be useful to be able to reuse the existing connection to the SQL server. In this way, I can reuse the existing dataset to create another report. I believe this is already the subject of a support ticket. Say I then wanted to reuse another connection from a different connection, say Oracle, to use in the same report, I could use the connections to those two sources and build the report. If I already have the sources online, and available for me, it would make sense that I could reuse them. At the moment, you can only reuse one data source. You cannot reuse more than one data source, at least if the data sources are online. One workaround would be to access each data source in turn, to obtain the data for the report. However, from October 2020, when using Excel driven reports, it is possible to reuse data flows or reuse the data component, from Power BI in Excel. So Microsoft has already implemented it for Excel, but it is still in the preview features. That will help a lot in financial areas. This could also impact company sales forecasts and sales.

I have 10 years of experience using BI tools, like Tableau, Power BI, QuickView, and MicroStrategy. I have a background in technical architecture but my main expertise is in BI tools. I use Power BI. It's a business intelligence tool that helps you develop and create reports that you can connect to various data sources. Then you can slice and dice, and build what you want to build from there.

Microsoft BI is stable.

The product is scalable, and new updates come out every month.

Microsoft Technical Support is very good. If I need their assistance, they will liaise with me. They are very flexible, useful, and very friendly. They are very open to helping you out. So depending on how you escalate your call, and say it's a high-priority issue they contact you very fast. They have support lines globally. So if I'm in the Czech Republic, I may be contacted by someone from Romania, or from India, or another zone. It's fine, if, for example, I'm not English, and I need to speak to someone who speaks Spanish, they put me in touch with someone who speaks Spanish. There is a lot of available support for Power BI, and they have their own Power BI page called Power BI Support. Power BI issues are registered on that page. Support usually fixes the issues within the given timeframe. The other good part about Power BI is the huge Microsoft community that it is there. So you can raise tickets and use the community which is on the same page. Sometimes the community helps you find your solution. So, it provides two ways to access support solutions.

It's easy to install which helps new users to the product. The installation process is easy. You can install it from the Microsoft store, or you can go directly to the Microsoft portal, and download the version that you require. It keeps historical versions available in case you need to test a different version. The advantage of the Microsoft store is that as soon as you install it from there, it always keeps you updated with the latest version. Also from a Power BI service point of view, you have several capabilities. The learning curve comes in when researching the different features, and what is new in the product, as well as what is going to be provided in future versions. The advantage of Power BI is that every month you have something new provided with the update. For example, you may have a new connection, additional visuals, or use new narratives.

We have 8,000 Power Bi licenses in our organization, so it is widely used. Setup is easy, and the cost is economical. You do sometimes need to pay additional costs for third party products which "plug-in" to Microsoft BI.

I would give Microsoft BI a 10 out of 10.