Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We're a retail hospitality chain spread throughout India, operating over 330 outlets across the country in various formats, ranging from a coffee chain to fast food restaurants through our in-house bespoke brands. All these brands run out of travel hubs like airports, railway stations, and highways stops. We needed a solution to manage both the multiple SKU levels and in terms of individual dynamics, the profitability of each store. We constantly track the various types of back-end raw materials, specifically on our prediction modeling where we use Power BI. We also use Power BI analytics to drive those results with regard to the day-to-day dashboarding, reporting in terms of collection, on sales trends per hour, manpower and the like. We are customers of Microsoft and I'm the CIO. 

I like that the interface is very fluid in the sense that you can upload via Excel or you can attach via connectors, any software you like.

The challenge of this product is in truncating the table data. It would be great if Microsoft would include a naming convention which has the advantage of enabling a VLOOKUP on top of it, so two tables can be merged more seamlessly. Currently, the time it takes to merge two tables in Power BI makes the entire analysis quite complex because it requires common numbering in one table and then creating another common indicator in another table in order to merge the two. It wastes precious time. 

Secondly, while they talk about visual analytics, sometimes the challenge is when you're looking for more in terms of geovisual analytics, such as city maps which requires a functionality whereby you can upload transactions. For example, if I want to visually present my data on an airport map, showing which stores are generating what revenue dependent on the traffic heat map, I am unable to do that because I cannot upload drawings. Ideally, I'd like to show each store as a bar map with waves explaining the sales in each location. It allows me to pinpoint which locations are more profitable. 

I'd like to see a degree of variability so I have the flexibility of putting those variable components in my predictive modeling, and I can get a feel for the trends. It requires a common input database. You can do it in Excel, but you can't do it in Power BI, which I find surprising.

We've been using this solution for nine months. 

The product is fairly stable, it doesn't get too many upgrades or updates from that perspective so it's fairly straightforward in terms of implementation and our entire ecosystem was on Microsoft which helped us. The only area that can be problematic is when you're trying to create relationships between two databases and you're trying to link it with your Power BI solution, sometimes that mapping takes considerable time.

The solution is scalable. We are a cluster of eight legal entities and we've been able to expand to all of them. We started with 20 outlets and today we have 350 outlets. We are more granular and today Power BI allows us to drill down to the last voucher. We have around 14 users from the finance and operations teams.

We haven't needed to call Microsoft, because we worked with one of their gold partners in India. So we are on an AMC model with them in terms of manpower. If there are any problems or upgrades we need, we reach out to the partner. 

The initial setup was straightforward for the simple reason that our entire ecosystem was on Microsoft and we use Azure Web Services in terms of hosting. We split the entire project into two parts to simplify things. The first part was more about the granular analysis of sales and various other elements, which took considerable time due to the many external stakeholders involved. Phase two was relatively simple, because it was department specific and we created a split team, which led to the creation of a better platform.

Licensing is on an annual basis. We have a complete Microsoft Ecosystem license. I think there is room for improvement with the licensing, specifically during the pandemic when it would have been reasonable to offer a discount. Many other companies, SAP and Oracle, for example, gave waivers to the MSME sector. Microsoft traditionally is used by smaller or medium-sized companies so I was expecting some sort of discount on the pricing, but unfortunately that didn't happen. We managed to avoid an escalation in cost, but frankly speaking, a discount would have been much appreciated.

It's important to understand your entire ecosystem in terms of your tables; the kinds of tables your back-end database has and the elements of analysis that you are looking at. If you are looking at predictive modeling, you need to have at least two to three years of data, because that allows you to define the trajectory of the predictive modeling. Otherwise, it doesn't serve any purpose. Secondly, be very specific with your implementation partner, as to how you'd like a particular visualization tool to look, otherwise you may not get what you want. Finally, it's important to invest in people and create a center of excellence made up of people who know Power BI well, or who will get trained and certified on it. You'll need an in-house team which can do the small tweaks and changes as you require, otherwise you'll get stuck each time you need to do something.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are an analytics company, and we consult for different companies. Currently, we were doing automation of financial reporting, income statements, balance sheets, cash flow, and different kinds of analysis on revenue and products. We extract data from ERP solutions, accounting data, and then we transform that into financial reports.

The data modelling and the use of decks are key features. It is difficult to create financial statements using most BI solutions, with decks it is a bit easier to summarize data and to have cascading totals that you would find in an income statement or balance sheet. Most other solutions, you can not have a moving total but with this solution, we found it very easy to implement. 

I also find connecting to different data sources is quite simple. Other solutions we were using before were complicated. 

I think that there should be visuals for financial reporting videos. It should just be a plug and play because there is a lot of coding that goes into it with different clients. We should have a visual for income statements and other elements, this should be made easier. For example, suppose you are looking at an inventory report, it is all plug and play because you can just use a matrix or a table to summarize the information and the visuals. The systems are more adapted to that kind of area than for financial purposes.

For the next release, I think they need to improve on getting more visuals that are related to the finance side of things. Like I mentioned before, the matrix now is more of an OLAP cube, we are looking into something more adapted to the finance field, such as a drag and drop where you can build an income statement very quickly without too much code. This would be a nice addition. 

As far as I understand Microsoft has two solutions that are similar, Power BI Report Builder and Power BI Desktop. The features that you get in Power BI Desktop are more advanced than the features that you get in Power BI Report Builder. They should just merge the two and move forward this way. There is no reason to have two different applications serving the same purpose.

I have been using the solution for 18 months.

The biggest problem we have had is refreshing with MySQL, we are using a MySQL backend. It has to refresh all the data at once and store it in a cache, is my understanding. I am not sure where Power BI stores the data that it gets from the warehouse, this takes some time. If there are interruptions in the network, then the figures become messed up at some point. It should either commit all the data or it should not commit anything at all if there are errors. I think that is the biggest issue we have had so far.

We are rolling out the solution to various clients and one of them is a large client in the manufacturing industry. The solution scalability is very good, we can do a lot with it.

We have about 40 users at the moment. As we continue to expand, we are looking at approximately 20 companies with about five users at a time. Currently, we have done five companies, but I think by the end of this quarter, we should have about 100 users in total. At the end of the year, we hope to have at least 200 users from different financial departments in different companies. It is my team that does the financial reporting, we also have other companies that have the operations and logistics. We are looking to probably double that figure because eventually, we should be moving to the enterprise license. We had seen that the enterprise license will be beneficial to us. If everything goes as planned, we are looking at about 500 users at some point.

At the moment we have not needed much technical support from Microsoft. Most of the problems we have faced have either been resolved by someone else on the forums available. We also have an expert consultant in the UK who helps us. The areas that have needed assistance has been very minimal.

We have used Eclipse BIRT and Knowage in the past but were not as good and more complicated. We find Power BI is more direct, it is much easier to connect to other data sources and so forth.

The setup was very straightforward. You just download through the Windows Store or through the website, then you just start to connect your databases.

The first deployment took approximately four months. The data preparation took most of the time, once we got into Power BI we had most of our financial reports in a month.

Part of our implementation strategy was to get the requirements from the customer, documents, information on what they were using before, key performance indicators and other information. Afterwards, we started to build the data warehouse with the requirements in mind. We tried to mimic the reports that they were using before when we were building the Power BI reports. We tried as much as possible to have reports that look similar to the reports to meet our customer's needs.

There is a similarity between Microsoft Excel and Power BI. If you understand one it make the other easier to understand. If you grasp Excel, it is easy to grasp Power BI as a user. We wanted to make it as similar as possible to the Microsoft Excel experience, with the drill-downs and the pivot tables and so forth. I think with the matrix in Power BI, it is more or less similar, it is the same experience. To summarize our implementation strategy, it was to try to mimic the reports as much as possible and then add more features that are available in Power BI.

We pay on a monthly basis which is approximately $10 per user on the Microsoft Power BI Pro license. At the moment we are still down at 400 users, but once we reach 500 users, we will move to the premium edition. The premium is $5,000 for unlimited users. Currently, with the 40 users, the cost is roughly $500. 

There can be some additional cost, for instance, it was an internal decision to have an on-premises gateway set up with the standard Windows Server installed on it. We had to set up this server on our side, which costs us no more than $400. This was important because we needed something to allow our reports to refresh on a regular interval without people using the personal gateways.

I would advise those thinking about implementing the solution to compare different products to see what is on the market. They have to look at the pricing which is what we looked at initially, I think it quite affordable. Additionally, research the infrastructure that is required and the cost per user for the different BI solutions. Some of the solutions are cheap, such as Eclipse BIRT and Knowage, but it takes a lot of efforts to get your reports out with them.

With this solution, it is more of a drag and drop scenario. You have a quicker delivery time as compared to the traditional or the older BI solutions.

The biggest lesson I have learned with working with this solution has been in the area of data warehousing, you should develop something that is more like a star schema when building a BI solution, especially with this solution. It makes things much easier. We did not favour the star schema, we preferred the snowflake approach. However, data modelling is easier when you use the star schema.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

Usually, when dealing with business intelligence projects with big data, all customers have Office 365 but within these licenses, Microsoft BI is often included.

The use case depends on the project. For example, in the logistics project, we need maybe four persons. For retail sales without stocks, it's a very easy project for us, but only for sales, and purchase orders, it's a standard part of the tool, to incorporate warehousing. Sometimes it's more difficult to clean the data if you have something like visualizations. It is often more difficult to understand what kind of data you need for the customer, or the strategy of the company who needs the information, to build a suitable solution. Customers often change their requirements. That's why Microsoft BI is more useful than traditional user tools, as it is flexible to changing requirements.

It's a great tool for visualization data, and it's free for engineers. Microsoft BI has a good online community. You don't need to be an engineer to use it. In Microsoft BI you can embed the visualisation and reports into your applications. Embedded items are much faster and cheaper to use. It's very easy to work with the customers using this kind of tool, rather than say, Oracle. I have used the personal edition, but some customers have been trained to use the professional version. Initially, I spent a lot of time learning the new system. As I was already experienced in other, similar technologies it was not difficult to understand the visualizations. I encouraged our clients to do more with Microsoft BI.

It should work faster and have more common languages so that you can use it more in different types of connections. It doesn't work well on big data. It is too slow. I hope in future it will be a comparable big data tool, such as, for example, Data Lake. It uses the DAX language, which is not used widely. Maybe they should develop this part of the tool to improve access to people who don't know DAX. Sometimes it needs to have a special configuration and hardware to connect to a data warehouse. So, interoperability with other systems could be improved.

I began using it a few years ago. I was involved in testing and last year, I was tasked with some large projects in Azure which included databases, a data warehouse with SQL, and Azure SQL. It is a cloud-based service, which means that a project is easy to use and design. You can use different tools for different things, but all the visualization in Microsoft BI is all in one tool. 

Microsoft BI is stable and works consistently well. 

Microsoft BI is a very scalable tool. You can start small and build up your project as you wish. 

I used Microsoft Azure support because we have a project. I have a good relationship with Microsoft. I don't have any problems.

It is easy to install Microsoft BI. You simply download and install it from the Microsoft Microsoft BI website, and it is available to download on windows. It can be downloaded and installed in 5 minutes.

Microsoft BI is free for the personal edition, but there is also a paid-for professional version. Setting up Microsoft BI is simple.

Oracle products are well-engineered but too heavy to accomplish small tasks. However, to use it for enterprise, you need to have a lot of knowledge about the different kinds of tools available. It has more flexibility but is more complex because it's designed for enterprise-level systems. Comparing this to Oracle which is at least 10 years old. Java is also old, but it's more structured. It's more proprietary.

Every month Microsoft puts in another update. We are likely to use Microsoft BI in future projects. Microsoft BI does not fit every business case, so for that reason, I would give it an eight out of 10.

We have SharePoint in our company and then we just wanted to visualize that list and it connects to the Check Point list.

We like the drag and drop interactability visualization. We really like that. It's user-friendly.

If I have to update data automatically, where I have to pin the gateway, it doesn't update. There is a scheduled refresh functionality so that it refreshes automatically, but I find it very hard to make it work. Even though it's supposed to connect seamlessly, it's a bit complicated to make it refresh automatically.

My company has been using Microsoft BI for a few years but I've been using it since January 2020.

It's very stable.

I think it's very scalable. I don't even foresee that as a challenge. 

We have five or six users who view the reports. There are other departments who might be using it as well but we have five or six in my department. It's expected to rise to 15, 20.

The users are managers who want to look at some of the resources.

I haven't interacted with Power BI before. If I get stuck at someplace, I just go online and I search in the forums and I find my way.

There isn't really a setup involved. It's just download Power BI desktop and publish it.

We have a premium Power BI license in-house that's quite an expensive license. It's $10 a month for four users and then I think 35,000 at the premium rate.

Ensure that you use Sharepoint. If you are within the Microsoft system and want to have a similar experience to Microsoft Teams, then Microsoft Power BI is a very good solution for that.

I would like to have the ability to run the scheduled refresh for R and Python on the server. Right now, it's not possible.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for data analysis and visualization.

The advantages of Microsoft Power BI stem from the fact that it is really easy to use. The drag and drop facilities provided by the product are good.

I only face problems when I want the product for free to help prepare for some of the demos for my company.

From any improvement perspective, I want the product to be made available to users free of cost. The product should not require any subscriptions.

The stability and scalability of the product can be better.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for six months. My company is a customer of the product.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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

I don't have any experience with the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support a five out of ten.

Neutral

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price.

The product improved my company's decision-making project when I was involved in a project where I had to do an analysis involving LinkedIn and other social media accounts.

The product's maintenance phase is easy.

My company can share and manage Microsoft Power BI across different teams in the company since we have only opted for the subscription for a single person. In my company, we do exchange web URLs, and it helps us exchange reports with different teams.

My experience with the real-time dashboard updates of the product has been good.

I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.

We've used Microsoft BI for the general use cases around reporting and dashboarding. We used it once for Power Apps to develop a live application.

Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved.

I have been using Microsoft BI for four years.

Microsoft BI is a stable solution.

Between Microsoft BI and Tableau, I would go for Tableau because it's more powerful. Tableau could connect to a variety of databases, and the visualization is much, much better. I would always prefer Tableau because of the dimension picking you could do there. Speed-wise, the latency issues were much lesser in Tableau.

If you're using Azure in general as a cloud service provider, Power BI would be more integrative. If you need a stand-alone system and are not worried about the cloud setup, I recommend using Tableau.

Microsoft BI for desktop is free to use, and you can download and use it.

Overall, I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

Enterprise reporting and digitization of dashboards using Microsoft Power BI, SSRS and Azure Reporting DB by integrating several applications to establish single version of truth.

Microsoft BI stack is very easy to use and most of the developer versions are free such as Power BI, DAX, SQL Server Development Edition. This helped us quick prototyping to generate value of data resting in silos. 

What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel. It is very compatible with Excel tools, and anybody who works with Excel can learn and use Power BI quickly. 

Writing formulas and data transformation are good features.

The only challenge I have found is that they do not have a Mac version of Power BI. They should have versions for both Apple and Unix because you cannot install the desktop version for these operating systems.

In the future, I would like to see them add more AI and machine learning features, as well as self-service analytics.

You can use R and Python, but it would be helpful if they had some no-code machine learning options that you find in other tools.

The UI/UX can be improved. Products such as Tableau and QlikView are very good in terms of the user interface.

I have been using Microsoft BI for five years, on and off.

I have not found any issues with respect to stability. Microsoft has invested a lot and they are continuing to invest in Power BI.

Given that there is a server version for services that can be used to implement and roll out reports at the organizational level, it's scalable.

In my current organization, I am training 15 people on how to use it and I am looking to expand to 50 users.

Microsoft support is quick. We also have a dedicated partner for support, and they are good.

Positive

Prior to incorporate Power BI in the stack, we were using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services(SSRS) only. They do not have any visualization interface, but you can do static reporting. This is the reason that we are switching. Probably, we will use SSRS and Azure SQL at the backend, but there won't be used as the visualization tool.

For visualization, we used to use Excel. Which not reliable. 

The installation is easy. The download takes perhaps five minutes, depending on the bandwidth. Overall, it can be downloaded and installed within half an hour and no training is required.

The desktop version is used for development and the cloud version is used to submit a report. Essentially, it is Power BI Desktop and Power BI Services. The desktop version is what is on-premises.

You can deploy yourself but of course, in an office, you require an administrator.

The cost of this product is very low, at approximately $8 or $9 per month for a developer. It is the cheapest of all of the visualization tools. They have a 30-day trial available for you to try it.

For personal use, this product is free to use.

Tableau is a little bit expensive, although it is good if they want a very sophisticated solution. Both Tableau and QlikView are a little better in terms of the user interface.

You need a technical team to operate the solution. You need people for the administration of the data connection and data integration. They should be skilled in SQL, data management, and so forth. Typically, these are data engineers.

We plan to continue using Microsoft BI. We are onboarding and implementing organization-wide for our long-term strategy, and the entire organization will be using Power BI.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it is easy to learn, especially for somebody who is good at Excel. Other tools are easy to use as well but if you are a Windows user then Power BI is a good option.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The main use cases that we see for Power BI are financial reporting, network analysis, structured and unstructured reporting, and self-service. We have just recently completed a pilot phase of Power BI and Qlik Sense, evaluating them against each other. In this pilot, we have had about 50 users in our company use Power BI, but eventually we envision having up to 300 concurrent users.

There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources.

There's also support for integration of Microsoft 365, which enhances collaboration with all these interwoven tools including email, Teams, SharePoint, and so on.

My main complaint is that the error messages need to be made more clear. Currently, they are either too generic or outright misleading, and finding the real problem is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Along with that, whenever you encounter an issue and you need to do some troubleshooting, it is really hard to isolate the problem. For example, is it related to your data? Is it related to your report design or your construct? Or is it related to the visuals? Power BI is really not that helpful when it comes to troubleshooting.

My suggestion is that there should be some kind of design validator that says, "Hey, warning! This report (or this set of queries) cannot run fast." There may be a long list of restrictions you need to take into account when it comes to optimization.

I have been using Power BI for nine months now.

It's not exactly as stable as I would like. We have had several service reliability issues as well as service degradation issues, which of course are typical to a sales based context. During those moments, though, it has been pretty inconvenient, especially for the users. Luckily we have not been confronted with that situation in production yet, as it was a non-production pilot setup.

It's not easily scalable for us, in the way that we consider scalability. You have to be careful when considering an upgrade to your capacity plan, which comes with an extra cost. Alternatively, you need to simplify the reports that you have designed with your plan and eventually remodel them to accommodate further usage without unnecessary cost.

Even then, you are confronted with various product limitations or scalability constraints. For example, there is a maximum amount of queries that you can launch simultaneously. Ultimately, you need to remain cautious because it's not a one-size-fits-all approach especially when it comes to the price.

I've used the Power BI support from various locations multiple times and I am satisfied with the help I received.

The current deployment we have relies on SAP BO (Business Objects) which is a vintage version and an aging solution, over approximately 10 years old now. SAP does have a more innovative replacement product, of course, namely SAP Analytics Cloud, or SAC.

We discussed our needs, requirements, report layouts, and so on with SAP and following further deeper analysis, SAP came back and confirmed that they could not realize it in the short term using SAP Analytics Cloud. It would require much more effort, including the integration of a data warehouse and more to reach our goals. And hence, as per SAP's recommendation, we dropped that scenario from our considerations.

It's a sales-based offering so, by nature, it is simple and straightforward. However, the integration options are quite fuzzy and relatively complex when you start to connect to the variety of data sources.

It took a relatively long time of about three months to get everything up and running. The setup took longer than expected, to be honest, but the reason is not only related to the product as such. It was also related to the existing knowledge and capabilities of the IT delivery provider, where multiple gaps were identified.

I designed the implementation of Power BI myself as the enterprise architect. I've been supervising the entire deployment and together with Microsoft product support, we've encountered various issues and discussed various situations on how to manage Power BI.

An example of the trouble we faced was that there were various middleware components that we needed to deploy as well. They were deployed but they were not up to the standards that I had identified. We had to upgrade and then patch them up to avoid that happening again.

As of today, we have a team of eight staff, including managers, engineers, and administrators, who handle deployments and maintenance.

Our license is paid yearly and we have found that we have to be careful not to over-extend our usage in order to avoid upgrading our capacity plan.

Whether I can recommend Power BI depends on what you are searching for with this type of tool. It is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

I would rate Microsoft Power BI a seven out of ten.