Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I use the solution to generate analytics reports for most of the projects we are engaged in within our company.

Some controls and integration capabilities of the product require configurations with the help of NoSQL databases, as it is one area where the product has certain shortcomings.

At times, I feel that the system needs improvement in single sign-on, especially for the on-premises side of the tool.

At times, I see the product freeze in unexpected areas. Unknown exceptions appear in the tool for no reason. One problem with the tool arises from the fact that it does way too much monitoring, impacting areas like reports and performance. The aforementioned areas can be improved in the product.

The tool should provide cloud support to help users deal with problems related to the frozen servers.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for five years. My company has a partnership with Microsoft.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Around 100 people in my company use the product. Most of the product's users are managers in my company.

The problematic licensing part of the product influences my company's decision on whether to increase the use of the product.

I haven't seen any major problems when dealing with the product's support team. The product's support team is friendly, but I think there are problems in Microsoft's internal communication since a problem gets distributed between multiple internal teams.

The product's initial setup phase has no problems unless we choose to have it integrated on an on-premises model and not on a cloud version. 

Most of the product deployments are carried out manually by our company.

My company opens reports and publishes the report files for the projects being handled. My company gives required permission for other users to access the reports.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. 

The solution's deployment process is simple to handle, but problems appear in the area of domains, considering that Microsoft Power BI manages the configuration part.

My company needs to make monthly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product. Considering my company's turnover, we need a tool that offers more flexibility and allows us to increase or decrease the solution in our environment.

Tableau offers more flexibility in service compared to Microsoft Power BI. Microsoft Power BI is simple to use compared to Tableau.

Microsoft Power BI has improved our company's data analysis and visualization tasks since it helps simplify our work. My company is able to generate data analysis and easily deal with visualization tasks.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Power BI for data storytelling stems from the integration with different types of products along with the support option it provides to help integrate with other tools. Caching in Microsoft Power BI would improve the organization's performance.

Microsoft Power BI's Q&A feature impacted our company's data exploration efforts since it is an area used by many types of users, including those involved in management and analytics, as it helps with cross-filtering.

The product's real-time dashboard and data refreshing capabilities are good, but it freezes without showing any status during the data retrieval if the volume is high.

It is not possible to use the product's in-depth features since it requires many controls and user interfaces.

The product is mainly for managers who want to track work details.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

I use it primarily for some application services. It's primarily for government statistics.

I use it for visualization as well, mainly for filtering data, and creating graphs and dashboards.

Power BI helped me to improve the decision-making process. It was particularly useful when I had data in a table, and I was able to use it as a dashboard with filters for better insights.

The sharing features are vital, especially the ability to share and test different shared dashboards.

It's quite manageable and easy to learn. It took me about a month to learn how to use it effectively.

Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports.

I have been using it for a year. 

It is a stable product. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

It is a scalable product but it could be improved to better suit the overall size of projects.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. 

There are around 50 end users in my organization. We plan to increase the further usage.

The customer service and support are not as easy to access as I'd like. I don't often find a direct portal to support. I end up looking up the internet. I would rate it one out of ten, but I would put it a five out of ten. 

I have to go and look up the internet. I sometimes just bring in expertise. I would prefer some tech support instead of bringing in someone else. 

I have to run a case. I want to have something easy and readily accessible. There is good stuff on the website, but it would be better if I could easily ring somebody. 

Neutral

I've used Tableau, but now we primarily use Power BI.

Each has its advantages, but Power BI supports our needs effectively.

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

We use it on the cloud. For us, deployment took six months.

The pricing is reasonable, at about 6.3 euros per user per month.

I'd recommend it for its features and cost-effectiveness. I find this product pretty okay. It works well for me. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

In January, I successfully published my application on AppSource, specifically targeting retail customers. Recently, I received positive feedback from a customer, which was truly gratifying. It seems that my application is Microsoft's preferred choice as it effectively addresses the majority of customer requirements and is tailored to their specific requests. 

Apart from retail applications, I have also developed solutions for BigChange, an organization dedicated to driving significant changes. Additionally, I have worked on creating reports focusing on production efficiency within my company. These reports have been well-received and have provided valuable insights. Lastly, I have recently worked on an application that involves managing IT resources and has developed a multi-dimensional model including SSIS and Power BI.

For the last project, I worked on creating data flows and implementing incremental refresh functionality. However, there was an issue we encountered regarding the date field in the tables. The existing portal dates were incorrect as they did not reflect changes in the records. To address this, we collaborated with the developers to introduce an additional column that accurately captures modified data in the system. This improvement has proven to be significant, and it can be implemented using the pro license, rather than relying on the premium license, as the premium license covers different aspects.

The Pro license offers great features such as incremental refreshing, which is highly beneficial. While it doesn't include direct query capabilities, I believe that many customers don't actually require direct query functionality. 

Currently, the developers in my company are busy adding a column in the API as part of our transition to BC Start. Our intention is to gradually migrate our customers to SQL Server, and that's why we are using the app.

In a simplified manner, when working on-site, you cannot directly connect to the regular table without using APIs. That's why the APIs need to be modified to include an additional column, making it suitable for incremental refreshing. Apologies for any disruption caused, but I hope this explanation clarifies the situation.

They find Power BI's data pull mechanism to be sufficient and cost-effective, especially considering the stability it provides. In comparison with other solutions, Power BI stands out as a fantastic choice. Therefore, I would definitely recommend sticking with the Pro license.

I believe there is room for improvement in terms of authentication and certain functionalities in Power BI. For instance, adjusting the width of columns is not easily done, as there is only an option to enable or disable automatic adjustment. 

This can be a significant drawback for clients who desire more flexibility.

Additionally, changing styles and formatting options for numbers require external tools, which can be inconvenient and time-consuming. Ideally, Power BI should incorporate these features within its platform to enhance user experience and eliminate the need for external tools.

I understand your frustration with the lack of automation and dynamic features in Power BI, particularly regarding the assignment of dynamic titles and content titles. While there are some options available for creating dynamic titles, they may not fully meet your specific requirements. It would be ideal to have more flexibility in manually assigning the desired typography for each call and dynamically setting content titles. Although it is possible to find workarounds for these limitations, I believe Microsoft will likely address these issues in future updates to improve the user experience. Despite these shortcomings, Power BI remains a powerful and highly capable application, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I have a strong belief that within the next couple of years, or even sooner, significant advancements will be made in Power BI. These advancements will make it even more powerful and I am confident it will become truly exceptional. I have complete faith in the future development and potential of this platform.

I have been working with Microsoft BI since the start of 2020.

I am working with the latest version.

Microsoft BI is very stable.

Microsoft BI offers scalability, particularly with the availability of premium capacity. With premium capacity, whether it's per user or a dedicated resource, Microsoft BI can effectively handle increased data volumes and accommodate growing user needs. 

Microsoft BI offers scalability in specific areas, but it is important to note that scalability options are limited to certain aspects and may come at a higher cost. For instance, the premium package, which starts at around $5,000 or more, provides enhanced scalability features. However, if you opt for the per-user licensing model, the scalability may be constrained as it is tied to the number of licensed users. Therefore, in terms of scalability, the per-user option may have limitations compared to other packages.

I wrote to Chris Web, and he replied to me immediately. He is the principal program manager at Microsoft.

I have him I have him working And, usually, I don't contact them, only when it is something serious. top expert and experts, and they reply, you know, has been one for us. It's great

In my professional experience, I have primarily worked with AS (Analysis Services), Power BI, and SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services).

Last week, I worked on creating SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) reports and integrated them with SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services). Additionally, I hold a Microsoft certification in this field.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is very easy to set up. it is very intuitive.

Perhaps it's because of my experience and expertise in the field that I approach things with caution. I don't take things for granted. Just because I obtain a certain result doesn't automatically mean it's correct, as there may be errors that are not displayed.

It's important to carefully check the measurements and ensure their accuracy, especially for beginners who may not be familiar with these nuances.

Maintaining the system is not difficult due to the availability of the admin platform. When it comes to permissions and access, it becomes straightforward as long as the customer's requirements are clear. 

You can easily define the level of access they need, whether it's building, reviewing, sharing, or restricting data access for online viewing. Depending on their specific needs, setting up gateways and configuring other settings is also simple. 

It's important to have a clear understanding of their security requirements and engage in discussions with the customer to determine the best approach. 

Often, customers may not be fully aware of what they want to achieve, and it's our job to help them identify their needs.

Especially for clients, it's important to understand that achieving the desired outcome is not as simple as just completing the task and generating the report.

There are several factors and considerations that come into play. Careful attention needs to be given to the creation process by different stakeholders if you truly want to achieve an exceptional result. 

Even small changes, such as removing certain elements from the selection or adjusting formatting, can have a significant impact on the report. Users may perceive the tool as being the same regardless of these details, but the difference between a subpar report and a high-quality one lies in the expertise and knowledge of the creator.

There are various options available for creating reports, particularly focusing on online reports. However, the foundation of the process lies in Power BI Desktop. Whatever we develop in Power BI Desktop can be published and accessed through a unified platform and tool. 

Data flows enable us to make necessary modifications, similar to working with Power Query and related functionalities. Personally, I find working with Power BI Desktop easier due to its comprehensive features and user-friendly interface.

You can gather data from various sources, including data flows, RBI databases, and SharePoint, among others, and then create and publish your report. While you do have the option to connect to online sources directly, I personally find that working with local data feels faster, at least for now.

Microsoft BI is considered to be competitively priced when compared to other similar solutions in the market.

I haven't had the opportunity to work with other tools as I found Power BI to be excellent. No one has specifically asked me to explore other tools.

However, I did purchase some tools on my own for personal learning purposes, particularly for tabular data. I may consider exploring other tools after June 15th, once I have completed my Microsoft exam DP-500 for Synapse.

Power BI is a complex tool that should not be taken for granted.

Its capabilities and functionalities are multi-layered, and the more you delve into it, the more you realize how much there is to learn. 

It can be both challenging and fun to explore the different features and unlock the full potential of Power BI.

As a BI developer, I joined the company without prior experience in BI. Since December 2021, I have been working on establishing a BI deployment in collaboration with a partner. My main focus is to create and enhance internal and external applications for app stores. Currently, my task primarily involves developing a new deployment strategy.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

We're using it for sales information and production information. Pushing a report into Power BI makes it easier to use and a little bit more powerful.

We're using the most recent version of the solution.

The flexibility of the program is valuable. We are able to add other information to the reporting information and expand upon it.

We found out that you can't share a report with others unless you have an additional package. That caught us off guard. It came as a program that somebody could go in, build a report, and show it, but you can't share it without having additional licenses.

We've had Microsoft BI for about two years, and we are using it currently. It's a part of Microsoft Teams.

It's stable. 

I don't know if it's scalable to the point that we want it. It seems to fit where we have it. We haven't really looked at its scalability. We have other tools, but it works well for what it's doing today.

There are roughly half a dozen users of this solution, and it has sales-related information. There is one driver, and she merges the information. So, there aren't too many rules at this point.

We don't have any plans to increase its usage at this time.

It has been good.

That would've been Excel. So, it isn't a switch; it is growth.

It was easy. We had a good understanding of being able to map two programs together. We had a little training, but otherwise, it was good.

The program installation took a few days, but it took weeks to make the intelligence and the company information look right.

We did it ourselves. We had an individual who worked with it in the past. She picked it up very quickly because she was already trained.

We don't need anybody specific for its maintenance.

We didn't evaluate any other options. The use of Power BI just came with the program, and we installed it. We weren't looking for something different. It just was there for us to use.

My advice to others who are looking into implementing this product is that it is important that they understand their information. They have to understand how the program works, but they also have to understand their information for it to work better.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

Currently, I'm working with an insurance company. Whenever they book any kind of policy, we have a certain rule where we have one predictive loss cost against that particular policy. For example, if you buy one pen, we can predict how much, if the pen got broken, how much premium you're going to pay for this particular pen. Based on that, we identify the risk area and we control the entire policy and the policy sourcing. This is the one interesting use case where we are basically controlling our entire government force.

Microsoft provides internal training and they have open forums. Normally, if we have any query on any part of the product, they'll be very responsive to our needs. 

The alert features are great.

The initial setup is pretty simple. It's a straightforward setup in our industry in particular.

The solution can scale.

We've found the solution to be stable. 

I learned data management and also visualizations on this product, and they are very interactive. Those two things are very strong points for Power BI.

There needs to be more flexibility in terms of handling the data. Data computation is not very good in PowerBI. It's a little bit of a heavier tool.

There are some limitations with the data models needed to build the report. I can't use multiple data models. You can handle lots of data, with higher volume in other tools.

We need some kind of flexibility with the objects, the graphs. We need more control over the data manipulations and data designing parts. That is a big thing from my side.

Some sort of SMS feature that could send alerts would be great for teams that work in the field. It would help, for example, if you forget to access the report. If it was over SMS it would be a game-changer.

I've used the solution over the course of the last year.

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

The product can scale. It's not a problem.

We currently have 300 company employees using the solution.

We're getting pushed to use the solution even more. In the next few months, we're likely to increase usage.

Technical support, in terms of security, is good. Microsoft Power BI is very good at responding and the follow-ups are very strong. I'm happy with Microsoft.

I also use SAS Visual Analytics. It's a little bit cheaper, however, it's not that much different in terms of price.

It's a straightforward setup. The deployment took hardly one day. It was quite a short period.

The implementation part varies, however, in our organizations, the deployment is very easy as we have a central team who looks at all the deployment parts. Normally we follow the standard guidelines and then we push further. My internal team is controlling this kind of information. It's much easier for me that way. 

It's easy for my industry. I don't know about the other companies, how the deployment part will go. I can only say that, in the insurance sector and in my organization, it's very easy.

While it depends on the team and the size of the deployment, in our case, we only needed one person to handle the initial setup. He was an operations person.

I have an internal team who deployed the entire thing. We did not use any integrators or consultants. 

We've seen a good ROI. It's a reporting tool that we can use on different platforms like mobile. We can integrate the report with the website. It provides good accessibility. You can access it from anywhere, anytime, and it's scalable. 

We're charged a monthly subscription fee of 500 rupees per person.

I explored Tableau, however, I found Power BI more stable.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It's above version six.

We are using on-prem. All the development is happening in the development environment and we are pushing to production. It is completed on Azure infrastructure. While production is on the cloud, development is happening on the on-premises server.

Microsoft is a very desirable product and they already have provided extensive support. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. If the data models were more robust, I would rate it higher. 

We are using this solution for analytic dashboards.

The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well. 

When it comes to security Microsoft BI can integrate well with Microsoft Domain Services, you are able to make it as secure as you want.

There are useful visualizations available in the dashboards.

If you are having millions of rows of data or you have a large database, Microsoft BI's performance depends upon how powerful your hardware is. When I am handling large amounts of data I do not use Microsoft BI or Tableau because of this, I use D3.

In a future release, they need to have better integration to allow any visualization that is done in other solutions, such as D3 or Tableau, to be able to be imported in Microsoft BI easily.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately five years.

The solution is stable when the database is reasonably sized. If you have large databases of 20 million rows it can begin to have difficulties requiring a purchase of more hardware.

The scalability is good. If you have a direct query, Microsoft BI can run on billions of rows of data.

Microsoft BI is available to the 70,000 users in my organization.

This solution is used extensively because everyone has access to it, not because it is the best.

The support from Microsoft could improve.

The solution is easy to install.

We did the implementation of the solution.

For those customers we have that use Microsoft BI on a dedicated server, we have a technical team that does the maintenance.

I have evaluated Tableau and D3.

I would recommend Microsoft BI over Tableau if you are comfortable with Microsoft solutions. Additionally, understand your use case and choose the best solution that fits your needs.

I rate Microsoft BI a six out of ten.

We are software developers. We generate data using the basic data connectors that Microsoft provides. We just follow the importing and exporting data around, the Azure platform.

We are doing C# development. We use an SQL server, and we use Power BI. Those are the main three technologies, and then it's just Microsoft to put it together.

We use this solution to create business intelligence reports for the executive users of our applications. We are creating standard business applications like ERP and CRM and e-commerce type applications. Then, we extract a sample of the data, build a simple data warehouse, in the Power BI service, and create some BI reports.

The data visualisation is very attractive from the user's point of view. Users see their reports and think "Wow - that is amazing". 

However, it is much harder to prepare data for reporting. I would say 95% of your development time is spent gathering, cleaning, and modelling data. However once that is done reporting is easy.

The capacity needs improvement. It is limited in its capacity in power.

Some of its features are incredibly difficult to understand. There is a learning curve to do the more sophisticated things. For example, paginated reports are complicated. But in general, Power BI, it's not an end-user tool, however much Microsoft pretended it is. We just treat it is like another tool that we use and we deliver the reports to our clients.

The orchestration module for refreshing data flows is something that is missing and we have to do it manually. It should be one of the admin features of Microsoft BI.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for 15 months.

We are using the latest version.

It is a reliable solution. 

I haven't tried to scale it, but in theory, I know that is capable. Power BI Premium is easy to scale as long as you have the money.

Inside the business, we only have one user, and outside the business, we have our clients where we have four developers who use this solution.

Our clients are medium-sized companies with 50 to 100 users.

I have not contacted technical support. Google provides the information that we need.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It can take a couple of hours to deploy the gateways, then there is the development of it.

It doesn't require maintenance, but we are forever enhancing the reports. In general, it works without problems.

We are developers, we can complete the installation ourselves.

We view it as an expensive product. 

Most of our clients cannot afford the premium capacity. 

We just make do with Power BI pro features, which is always a big shame because we know that the premium version has a lot of features that we would like to use, and are not available to us.

There are a few different licensing models.

It ends up being complicated and people don't like paying for things. It's okay if you're working for a large corporation because they can obviously spend thousands of pounds every month on licenses, but our customers cannot.

Licensing is paid on a monthly basis.

Power BI has approximately 20 new features that come out every month. You just have to be patient and eventually, the features come out.

My advice to others would be to do your homework. It's one of those things where you have to get past the marketing. The marketing message is not helpful.

I would suggest that if you are going to use Power BI, you need to use developers who understand what it can do, what it can't do, and how it works. 

Then they will then guide you to say, this is the type of report you can expect. 

It took me a long time to realize what you can and cannot do with Power BI.

That's why I suggest doing your homework first. It's not as wonderful as Microsoft pretends it to be, but it's not bad, and I am not knocking it, but you have to cut out all the hype that comes with it.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

I mainly use it for sales analysis. We are in the telecom industry, so on a daily basis, we see a couple of trends in the number of activations of customers and registration, the performance of the dealer, and items like that.

Its integration with the Microsoft Office Suite is great. I can easily connect it to any of the Excel or any CSV files, and I can immediately create a dashboard. 

It's like the higher level of pivot tables. For the people who mainly use Excel, this is like an advanced version. This is much more flexible and I don't have to train people to use it, as it's very user-friendly compared to Qlik. Qlik needs some expertise and a layman cannot immediately go to Qlik and do stuff unless he understands it. When it comes to Power BI it's a five minutes tutorial, he can definitely understand what needs to be done.

The solution is stable and scalable. So far I don't have any issues, however, it depends on the amount of data we use. I'm just running it on my PC.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution is free as it's bundled with Office 365.

Maybe they can enhance the UI a bit. Right now, it's very basic, I would say, compared to the MicroStrategy or Qlik. 

They could also improve the mobile experience. If people are using this mobile app for BI, they need better performance there. The rendering of the objects, for example, if you create the dashboard on Power BI when someone sees that on the app, it comes in a different format. They can do some enhancements there to standardize it.

Once we expand it as a centralized repository, if I could find much more use cases, that would be ideal. However, now it's very limited in our organization.

We don't use the solution filly and don't yet have a license for it. That said, I've had the chance to work with it for more than a year now.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and we don't have any trouble with it crashing or freezing. It's reliable and the performance is good. 

My understanding is that the solution is scalable. 

I can easily load a billion rows in less than two or three minutes and play around with it. However, I haven't tested on big data files or anything like that.

Right now, we don't have too many users. It's just three to four people as of now, as our primary BI tool is still Qlik Sense. It's only for ad hoc use cases we use Power BI, and just myself and a couple of team members, as well as the BI specialist, that access it.

I've never reached out to technical support in the past. If I run into issues, I tend to Google solutions to find answers to my questions. YouTube is also a good resource if you need information.

We currently use Qlik Sense as our BI product.

The initial setup is not complex or difficult. It's simple and straightforward. 

It took, 10 to 15 minutes, if I remember correctly, to set everything up. It's just a .exe file installing. It's not hard and it's pretty fast.

We did not need a consultant or an integrator to handle the implementation. I just played around a bit with it.

We don't have a license on Power BI, so we don't publish anything. It's mainly for some ad hoc use cases that we use Power BI format.

Power BI is free; it comes with Office 365.

I've currently looked at MicroStrategy and am in the process of comparing a few other products.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

We are using Power BI, however, not to the full scale. It's still unlicensed as of now, and I'm using desktop versions only.

I don't remember the version, as it comes with Office 365. I didn't give a thought to the version.

From my experience with the desktop version, I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

From my experience, I'd recommend the solution to others.