Power BI is good with handling simple relationships between tables in a data model. But, if there are complex relationships between tables, that is, if they have more than one links between tables, Power BI might not handle them well. You need to create a data model carefully by having more unique fields so that Power BI does not confuse the relationships when it comes to complex relationships.

In most cases, you might not feel the need to configure and optimize visualizations in Power BI. But even if you do, Power BI does not provide many options to configure your visualizations as per your requirements. Thus, users have limited options for what they can change in visuals.

The user interface of Power BI is often found crowded and bulky by the users. It is in the sense that there are many icons of options that block the view of dashboard or report. Most users wish that the user interface or the report canvas was clearer with fewer icons and options. Also, creating scrolling dashboards is a native feature.

As we know, the expression language used to deal with data in Power BI is DAX. However, you can perform a lot of actions using the DAX formula in Power BI, it is still not the easiest language to work with. Sometimes the formulas you create work well in Power BI, sometimes they don’t. You can concatenate up to two elements but concatenating more than two elements needs nesting statements.

Power BI has a limit of ingesting data at a time which is approximately 2 GBs of data. If you wish to import and use data of even greater volumes, you need to extend your free version to a paid version of Power BI. Also, users have reported that Power BI takes a little more than usual time or even hangs while processing millions of rows and columns of data.

Usually, Power BI is the easiest to use BI tool if you are using it simply to import data and create reports. But Power BI is an entire suite having a lot of other interrelated tools. When the purpose of your use is more than just creating reports in Power BI Desktop, you need to learn and master several other tools like Gateways, Power BI Report Server, Power BI Services, etc.

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I'm comparing this with other existing and newcomer BI tools. The look and feel of the tool has, only like a month back, undergone a major change. If not, for the last five years at least, last four years at least, the look and feel have been very, very similar all the time. 

It did not change much in the last four years. Barring a lot of functionalities and capabilities being added, it did not change much. The look and feel were pretty much the same. However, about a month back, the latest release of Power BI, they made some further, drastic changes to the way the buttons and the panels are set up. That said, they can do more. There are still better UI designs they can go through. I'm assuming they are focusing more on capabilities rather than look-and-feel designs.

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So, comparing Power BI to MicroStrategy, for example, some other tools are quite robust in terms of data analytics. 

From a scalability and performance perspective and based on my understanding and feedback from end users, there's room for improvement in data processing, scaling up, and leveraging the cloud. That could be an enhancement area for me to look into.

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When we have a big report with lots of data, the solution slows down quite a lot. It's not very fast to upload and refresh the real-time data that we use. The solution works fine for a dashboard that does not have much data, many levels, and breakdowns for different fields.

When we build something a bit more complex, Microsoft Power BI takes a lot of time to upload. I don't know if that's the solution's fault or our system's.

Sometimes, the solution doesn't work. You need to have a license, but we integrate it and make it part of our system so everyone can use it without a license. If I share a report in PowerPoint, it takes a while when you deploy it again. So, it's not always fast, and then I have to ask IT for help.

When you export a file, it should be the export that you choose on a report rather than just the raw data. At the moment, it just gives you everything as raw data in a page without any filters.

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It is an evolving solution. So, it still has some rough edges. As compared to Tableau or QlikView, there are some things that you can't do when you want to. For example, giving specific access to some reports for users. You can get it up and running very fast, but some things are a bit trickier, and for some of the things, you need to actually write code. 

It is sort of a work in progress. They're catching up on the competition, but it still takes time. Other solutions are more mature, and they have been in the market much longer, but it is catching up. It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better.

There should be the ability to export to PowerPoint or PDF. It should be more efficient. It's rather clunky right now. Sometimes, the system is inconsistent in the way it does things. 

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There needs to be improved guidance and documentation for the initial setup of Power BI as it currently remains complex. While the current setup process is not necessarily bad, investing effort in this area will be beneficial given the challenges involved. Additionally, with Azure itself evolving into a sophisticated and complex platform, coupled with the integration of various analytics tools within the Microsoft ecosystem, challenges arise from multiple fronts.

Another aspect worth mentioning is data transformation integration. Currently, there are multiple approaches to data transformation on Azure, including Azure Data Factory, Data Lake, Power BI's data transformation capabilities, and data flows. The abundance of these approaches can lead to complexity, and there may be benefits to converging them into a more integrated solution.

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We're a big organization. We're looking at standardizing. Anybody can just pick it up and use it because it's easy. We want to be able to standardize what Power BI is and I think that's a challenge that we're encountering now.

Anything they can do to improve enterprise collaboration is going to help people get set up and utilize the solution.

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Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them.

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It is not yet ready for enterprises. For a big enterprise data model, it is not so stable, and it also doesn't scale so well.

I am not really satisfied with their support. Their support should be faster. They should also be more knowledgeable.

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If you create too many pages, things can get heavy and slow down significantly. Once you create the dashboard, the data is updated at certain time intervals. I'd like to see more flexibility around those time options. It's difficult to easily share the dashboard with people outside the organization. 

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When I create measures, sometimes the error messages aren't clear. It makes me spend more time searching for solutions. I need the error messages to be more specific.

So, I would like clearer error messages when creating measures.

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It should integrate with multiple enterprise applications. For instance, integrating CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and HCM (Human Capital Management) with Power BI can be a significant advantage.

Because, organizations focus on and like software that can do multiple tasks.

The user interface is good but it should have the ability to interact with multiple systems.

I would like to see more AI capabilities in future releases. There's a strong interest in AI, including technologies like GPT, which facilitate real-time interactions.

It's all about real-time interaction between customers and the system, automated to operate under specific scenarios. This ensures it functions in real-time, leveraging AI for more dynamic engagements without needing predefined projects or setups, much like how chatbots are designed for real-time use.

In future releases, I would like to see more encrypted software, and there should be version control for Software. It will avoid pirated downloads. 

I would also like to see dynamic content. It should be an add-on in Power BI. It helps users understand reports more easily. For example, when a developer is building a report, they should consider using dynamic content to make the report more user-friendly.

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Microsoft BI typically connects to a database, often SQL Server, but it's also capable of connecting to multiple databases, pulling data from them, and allowing for data consolidation. You can then aggregate and generate dashboards and reports from this combined data. Personally, I wouldn't claim to have the expertise to suggest significant changes or additional features, as it functions quite well as is.

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The Microsoft BI interface should be simpler and more user-friendly. I find it very difficult to move between their data sources and their analytics section. It's probably designed by data analysts that typically get the data from somewhere else. So, one person logs into Power BI, moves the data around and puts it in the proper form then somebody else goes in from the dashboard. What I'm finding more and more is that the person playing with the data is also going to be the person building the dashboard, so the interface needs to be more seamless and dumbed down for the average user. 

Tableau is much better at that, which is probably why it's more expensive. The days where one person works on the data and someone else does the analytics are coming to an end. In the past, larger organizations usually had a dedicated analytics team and a dedicated data team. Now we buy data as a service, so we got rid of our data team and we don't have analysts per se. Instead, we have smart users. So I think Microsoft BI needs to move on to the next iteration of truly user-friendly solutions.

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I haven't personally faced challenges with Power BI, but it might be challenging when it comes to big data usage. I haven't had a real challenge yet - maybe it could become challenging due to a lack of information or skills to use Power BI at a more advanced level.

So, the product could be complex for inexperienced users. It's very complex and you need to keep up with the updates. Otherwise, you can miss a lot of nice features that can be useful in your daily work.

I'm looking for something that can make it much easier to incorporate Power BI visuals or dashboards into, let's say, Power Apps – custom Power Apps or anything like that. 

The most important thing would be to seamlessly embed reports in applications. For example, to have buttons that can be navigated through multiple solutions – from Power Apps to Power BI to SharePoint – via links or something like that. 

If this transition is more natural (so users don't notice they're moving between solutions), it will be very helpful in developing complex solutions without sophisticated workarounds or lots of code. 

Staying within the low-code area, there's a lot of potential for interesting things. This is my main focus – developing low-code solutions that integrate with Power BI.

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Microsoft BI lacks integration capabilities, so it needs to consider increasing its integration capabilities. Microsoft BI needs to improve its mobile application compatibility so that people view their reports and dashboards through a mobile app since, nowadays, people move towards tools that are in the digital transformation phase.

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Trend data and dashboards need improvement.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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We looked at it for these two new projects too, however, we needed more real-time data on this other project and so it wasn't a good solution and we thought Qlik Sense would work better.

If you need data in real-time, it's not an ideal solution.

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It is a difficult tool to use and it's hard to figure it out.

It's not user-friendly; more tutorials, training, and better documentation would be helpful.

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If I compare it to Tableau, I'd say the visualizations can be better. We should have multiple options. By that I mean, while there are multiple options for the visualization, the look and feel of the dashboard when you compare to Tableau is on the lower side. Tableau has a much better visualization.

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The solution struggles with large amounts of data. It has some limitations. Sometimes, we don't know if we have the full picture.

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There is room for improvement in terms of pricing for the solution.

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This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low. 

Other than that, their licensing costs could be lowered. Microsoft handles everything. For example, if I want to publish a report order from Powerpay, Microsoft doesn't allow me to do this. It's a complete business, but the licensing is very costly. I don't think Microsoft will change their pricing system, though. 

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I'm not a product expert as such, however, I am aware that Microsoft comes out with a newer version, which is really downloadable and it's replaced every month. Therefore, the improvement is continuous. Since Microsoft provides a free downloadable desktop version of our BI. That desktop portion gets a new version which comes every month, we can replace the older version. 

Their ecosystem is quite good in terms of adding new features, in terms of adding custom visuals or adding many more interfaces or reporting features and more functionality within existing reporting and graphs. We don't have much to complain about except that they can always add many more features as they go.

Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution.

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Its desktop tool is a little bit memory CPU intensive, and it can be improved, but the machines nowadays come with a lot of memory. For the desktop users who are using it on the desktop, we recommend that they do an upgrade. It is a minor issue. We can fix it on the desktop.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata.

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Microsoft Power BI can be confusing, because it has two languages that you need to learn if you want to use it. This is its area for improvement. First, you have to learn DAX (data analysis expressions), then you also have to learn Power Query M. You need to learn two languages simultaneously. If they can combine and make it just one language, it will be easier for nontechnical users.

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Right now, their premium pricing is keeping us out of the premium market. The premium price per user just doesn't make sense for us, but we haven't reached the limit of 500 users to justify the premium.

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It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes.

It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. 

The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable.

I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community.

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Based on my experience, everything's good in Power BI. Consistently, it's being updated every month. There's a new feature that is being added to the platform, but I think one thing that can be improved is with regard to the error messages. When there is a problem, the error message is not specific about what's causing the problem. Maybe they intentionally generalize it because there could be a lot of causes. From an improvement perspective, I think if the Power BI developers of that platform would really focus on being more detailed and specific on the error messages, it would help a lot of developers troubleshoot and maintain the report ECT or the dashboard ECT.

There needs to be more specific error messages. You encounter problems normally for the development part and maintainability part, and there are some issues that you or any developers would encounter. It's resolvable, but it would take some effort to really dig in and investigate. Some of the messages, for example, will say that the main package is missing, which could mean a lot of things. It could be a formatting error, it could be a file type error, it could be a transformation error on the helper file, et cetera. If there was a sub-description of what that is, it would be a great improvement on Power BI.

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The only concern I have faced with Microsoft BI is the time it takes to find out an issue and rectify it.

In my last project, I worked with SSMS as my source and Oracle as my destination. This meant that there were certain compatibility issues between the two. I recommend for incremental load that Microsoft BI can include one task to overcome this concern.

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Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse. Those are the data sources I didn't find in Power BI. Those data sources cannot be connected to Power BI. You need third-party support for that. This is the one key problem I have with Power BI right now.

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The solution is somewhat costly in comparison with MSBI tools. 

In MSBI, when it comes to mobile and maps-related applications, we are always looking for some support with the reporting tools. Once we click on the region, then automatically it goes to the two area maps. Based on the map, it will reinforce our data values. There is constant change involved and new updates and enhancements are coming out as needed in new versions. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved.

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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.

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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.

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One of the more difficult things to do is to export some of the data from Power BI to Excel. It is getting better. It's better than it was six, eight, or nine months ago, but it's still not quite there. They could probably improve that a little bit. 

The only disadvantage of how we're using it is that it can be difficult to get the data into Excel at times. A lot of users are very familiar with Excel, so having a seamless interface into Excel would be a big plus for a lot of people, in my opinion. Otherwise, it's an excellent product.

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I would like to see Microsoft BI add custom visuals and certain machine-learning capabilities. It would be nice if the DAX functions could perform some kind of predictive modeling. Right now, it just does a kind of descriptive analytics.

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It's quite difficult to learn how to use Power BI. I'm not from the IT background, and I've been given the license to use the Power BI, however, I find that the support and video demos from Microsoft are not really helpful for me. I don't handle Microsoft BI 24/7. My working time isn't dedicated to using it and learning it. I need it for certain tasks and trying to wrap my head around it, while also handling other duties is difficult. There's too much of a learning curve for beginners.

The cost of the solution is high.

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I don't know if I can pinpoint any specific items that I don't like. However, the more connectors that they provide the better. 

I don't use it day in, day out to tell you if it has any kind of functionality items that may be open up for improvement opportunities. 

The solution could probably beef up items related to statistics and things to cover the gap between the advanced things that you can do with Tableau. Any kind of advanced statistical analysis would be very helpful in future releases.  

The solution could be quicker at rendering data.

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Microsoft BI lacks some of the scheme features. It would be beneficial if there were a way to show how we move values in a different way.

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In SAP, we have a suite of components here in a single module. This includes forecasting and budgeting. There's also a smart answers section. Whenever we design any chart or something, the tool provides some information regarding that data. That would be quite a good feature that could be included in future versions of Microsoft BI.

The licensing could be a bit better.

You do need to do some hard coding for certain things in Microsoft BI.

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There could be an integrated AI that can automatically analyze some of your data and highlight or provide suggestions. For example, when you are looking at a data set, it can suggest putting it into a certain type of chart so that you gain different insights or a trend line. You would almost have templates that it would recommend for you.

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We have used other solutions and the reporting functionality should be user-friendly and have a drag and drop feature should be available, but Microsoft BI doesn't have these features. When you are creating reports and you can't change as a user. Every time you need one developer or one technical person to make the changes.

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For managing the business, it's okay, however, as a product management tool, it's lacking. I would like to use BI to provide services for the customers eventually. Microsoft's solution is not good for improving the product for the customers. It's just good for managing the business, and not supporting the customers.

The solution doesn't integrate well with third-party tools.

I'd like them to add to the knowledge base, or at least to offer more documentation about how to use the solution.

It would be helpful if more AI was integrated into the solution. 

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Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now.

When you're building, the documentation sucks. It's a painful experience to find out how to do things inside the connector framework. 

I don't like the fact that they need to have a premium excuse to manage larger sets of data. On top of that, there are limitations in building a custom connector. If you want to build a custom connector for your customers, the navigation is flawed. For example, when I build a custom connector to talk to Power BI and report, I want some contextual data of the report, and I want to have what we call incremental refresh. However, incremental refresh right now is only supported in a SQL-based backend. It's not supported for API-based connectors. That's something that we really, really want. We only try to work around it.

Basically, I would love to see that incremental refresh with API-based connectors. I'd also want the report-based contextual information available inside the connector.

The licensing is very confusing.

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The solution's documentation needs improvement. It is always a challenge to connect any data that Microsoft needs to read. I'm not able to find out. The solution's visuals and themes are really poor and should be improved.

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It could be changed to the point where it's more suited for self-serve analytics.

The look and feel should be updated in terms of the types of dashboards and graphs that you can produce. They aren't as visual as some of its competitors.

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They should improve the connector to on-premises data. Microsoft Power BI was born native on the cloud, however, it's quite difficult when it has to connect to on-premise data sources. You have a gateway. It's not very easy.

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Not yet assessed. A final assessement will be realized once the system has achieved 1 year of operational results. View full review »

I feel the modeling page should be simplified. The links between different parts of your data, on the models' page, are a bit confusing. It was difficult for me to learn. 

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There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution and there are certain features that Microsoft should include in the MSBA solution. One is the connective level problem that we currently face from the different data sources. It provides about 80% connectivity to all the data sources, but there is the remaining 20%. They could provide some kind of additional functionality which would make it a great solution. 

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It should have more report outputs. They should expand the report outputs.

Its documentation should also be better.

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The visual outlet or the visualization aspect can be improved because the settings piece is quite problematic. It requires a lot of time to set the visuals and check. It is quite fiddly to change all the settings and font sizes. It just needs better ability in terms of using templates or visualization templates to get the vision. Our users always benchmark based on the product, and they don't appreciate everything under the bonnet. The only rating is based on the actual reports in the settings for the dashboard. They should make it look a bit funky and a bit more aesthetically pleasing on the eye. It is quite a fiddly tool, but other than that, it is pretty slick. 

Because it is community-driven, the marketplace tends to be changing forever. You get the standard visualizations, and you've also got all other marketplace visualizations that require you to spend a bit more money and purchase things in the marketplace. With certain visualizations, there is no longevity. I had used certain visualizations, but they discontinued them, and I had to rebuild my reports, which is obviously very frustrating. There should be some sort of stabilization around how the marketplace visuals impact the users when they expire.

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I need more time with the solution. Right now, I can't think of any features that are missing from the product.

The integration with other solutions could be improved for reporting aspects. There are some reporting features in Tableau that we need access to and it would be ideal if there was a function between the two for data integration and data manipulation, with the final representation of the report available on Tableau.

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Microsoft BI comes under pressure when there is a lot of data to be crunched. It gets slower and slower, and the functionality becomes a bit of a problem. The performance goes down with data being fed into the system. The infrastructure requirement also increases if you have to increase the performance. This is the area that can be improved in my opinion. Initially, the product is good, but over the years, when data gets accumulated, it becomes a problem unless the old data is kind of archived and is no longer shown on the visualization.

It has a feature by using which a user can query for a report through simple questions to a bot. So, if I want to look for the customer share of revenue by geography, I just simply state that in the chatbot. If I wanted it in a pie chart, then you say, "Please show it to me in a pie chart." It comes out well for basic charts. This feature should be improvised more so that people can very quickly get customized reports on the go.

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I would like to see the product offer more graphics to impact different audiences. Also, I would like more ease in connecting with the different database drives.

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The SQL Server Reporting Services can certainly use some more help. Within SSIS, I see room for more connectors and easier debug messages that would speed up the process of development. The biggest hurdle that any developer comes across is vague error messages.

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The product’s on-premise reporting servers could support real-time data refreshing capabilities like its on-cloud version. It would be a very useful functionality.

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There is an issue with Microsoft because the on-premises Power BI is behind the cloud Power BI. So, the on-premises Power BI is six months or one year behind the cloud version because Microsoft published the cloud features first, and then they published the on-premises version. This has been an issue. They should be on the same level of capability.

There are some limitations in Power BI; you have to work in the Power BI base. However, if you want something not out-of-the-box and you want something custom, you have to do a lot of work. Microsoft can provide some easy way to customize the dashboards.

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The UI looks awkward once the graphs have been generated in the console. This is what Microsoft can work on. They should make the graphs more user-friendly, because other parts of Microsoft Power BI are user-friendly, but the graphical representations aren't.

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There's a lot of room for improvement because Power BI is a new tool and hasn't really been in the market for that long, especially considering alternative tools such as MicroStrategy or Tableau which have been around for more than a decade. Because Power BI is younger than those tools, I feel it hasn't reached a certain level of maturity that comes with time and it is lacking in quite a few areas which I'm hoping will be seen to in the future, given how it has been progressing so far with its new releases.

There is no specific area that I have a problem with. It's just that, with whatever feature you come across, every visual has its own formatting and behavior. What you get in one visual for a feature, you don't seem to get in another.

When it comes to the feature's functionality, that's all fine, but, say, for instance, that you want to go ahead and turn off only the sub totals and not the grand totals. This might not be immediately possible, especially if you are working in a project where your technical solution is the backend site which the users don't quite care about. What they care about is what they see and interact with, and the visuals and formatting (and visual settings) at hand are what really matter to them.

This is where I think standardization really needs to come in. Basic stuff like being able to selectively turn on or off only the sub totals or grand totals. There should be certain formatting options which should be standard across every visual. What options you get here, you should also get over there, for example. These are simple things, but many a time it's something the end user takes very seriously. They generally do not care about what's happening in the background with regard to the calculations and everything else.

In essence, the standard visualizations should have features and options in common with one another, even when it comes to other visualization tools such as bar charts and line charts. These are all pretty basic visualization features, and giving them some standard way to be customized will make them as capable and competitive as what other tools allow you to do. Of course, you can do this if you add your own custom visuals from the library, but when it comes to basic default stuff, they should at least be deep enough in terms of standard customization to compete.

Right now it seems like they're trying to add a lot of features, but at the expense of losing out on the essence of the basics. The basics in Power BI should be equally as good as the basics in any other tool, and in this case I believe it to be a problem of adding more depth to certain features. The width, and variety, of features is not a problem for me. Whatever features are already available need to be deep enough to work with comfortably, and I feel this is where Microsoft needs to direct its focus.

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The initial installation is difficult. 

The pricing is a bit high and we'd like it to be less expensive.

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I am taking a course to be able to use the solution better. Some aspects of the solution are not straightforward.

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I haven't used the advanced version and therefore haven't accessed all of the features.

The solution isn't very scalable. My data is restricted to my DB and I'm not sure how this would handle an extremely large dataset.

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I cannot think of anything needing improvement at present and am quite satisfied with what we have, This said, I would like to see integration with Excel. This is because many of our customers like to have their results appear not only on a dashboard, but also in Excel, as they use it extensively. They would approve of the integration. 

Also, there should be greater functionality from Power BI for the performance of certain complex tasks. Many things are being done with the interface and if we'll want automation to play a role then we will need more flexible programming, such as we have with Data Expressions. The interface must be utilized for carrying out more complex tasks. We wish to automate this using software and programming language. 

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Actionable insights could be better. I would like it to provide exceptional reports that you need to act upon to keep your operations or businesses going. That's something I would like to see. 

On the origination side, if there are better graphs and maps to visualize data like I've seen other tools like Tableau do, it might be useful. They need to have very different ways of presenting information. If it's eye-catching, better than a pie chart or a bar graph, that's even better.

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• Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. 
• Not having to login again after a mobile app upgrade. A simple login on mobile would be great. 

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No product is perfect, and the Microsoft stack is no exception. The first things that come to mind are Microsoft's recent shift in strategy to focus on cloud first. While this makes sense for them, it leaves the on-premise products lagging in support and new features, while the vast majority of users (mid to large corporations) are still using on-premise solutions and/or are cloud-averse. For example, the announcement that the pricing model for Power BI would change, simultaneously rolling out both Power BI Premium and Power BI Report Server created a great deal of confusion for people who were very enthusiastic about the product. The failures to address concerns with the speed and nature of the changes were felt by users across the spectrum, and it was a situation created by their cloud-first strategy. Similarly, if you look at the tried and true on-premise options for data processing, interfacing with emerging technologies, especially big data technologies, lags behind. This is considerably less true for Azure users, but that is specifically a cloud offering, which again, many corporate entities are not yet ready to embrace.

It's easy to think of BI as only the visualization aspect of data, and that point of contact between users and data is absolutely where the rubber meets the road in BI. In reality, there are a whole stack of tools and concepts behind the visualization that enable that interaction - from security, data governance, integration, performance, network and infrastructure, and automation... there are many facets to BI as a system. The visualization aspect, while being the most visible to business users, also happens the be the weakest point in the entire Microsoft BI stack. The PowerBI visualization experience is underwhelming in almost every way compared to many alternatives.

Another difficulty is navigating the many products within the suite. There are many components, and each component has many versions. Dealing with feature and compatibility issues with so many versions of so many products can be very frustrating at times. Microsoft does not do itself any favors on this front with the way they name their products. "PowerBI", for example, could be in reference to the desktop design tool, a cloud-based service for publishing and administering data models (which comes with three distinctively different pricing models, the features of which are different and not interchangable), or an on-premise server solution replacing SSRS. You'll make yourself dizzy looking at the Azure services offered. The good news is the sky's the limit, the bad news is you'll have to navigate some pretty cloudy areas to make heads or tales of what to actually use.

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The accounting data needs improvement. 

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They should provide some kind of extra visual. There are a lot of third-party companies that provide these visuals, however, it would be better if, instead of relying on a third party, they could have their own. We should have by default in the package itself, some good visuals.

Technical support could be a bit better.

The performance could be enhanced in the sense that there is a limitation of the volume of data that it can hold. 

While they have some different options out there, they did not improve anything when you connect to any dataset, when you have to import. You need to connect online, meaning live.  

You cannot create so many things on the Power BI side, such as adding a new column, which is not possible in your live reporting, direct query option. In contrast, with the import method, you can do so many things. They need to improve on the direct query option side.

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

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Integrating it with the physics build model or the engineering model should be included. When we use engineering models linked to Microsoft BI or Salesforce, the engineering models are from a third-party application.

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Something that everyone has suggested and that we are currently implementing and testing is the ability to export tables with the same format. That is something many customers were seeking, and right now it is possible to do that. Focusing on table support is a huge opportunity.

One opportunity for improvement would be on the Power Query side. As a consultant, I know Power Query is not the main strength of Power BI. It is not where Power BI shines, but many customers use Power Query to do full ETL workloads for deliverable cookies.

When you try to process a lot of data from one million records, it breaks. The computer runs out of CPU and memory. It's terrible, but I know it's not its main purpose, so that would be my suggestion.

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It's not really complicated, but I didn't find the things I was looking for. The ones I used to work with within Dash are more open, and there are more choices. But with Power BI, there are only limited types of plots that I can use.

For example, when I wanted to put the plots in Power BI, there was no extendable space. You have a limited page where you can place a maximum of three plots in that, and you can't do more than that on a single page. You have to create a new page, a different page for that. That made it a bit annoying, and the filtering part is limited, with basic functions. If you want to make custom filtering or custom functions, you can't do that.

Suppose you want to code a plot, Python available. You can code the plot you want, and you don't have to use a predefined one. But when you want to plot it and you want to import like five or ten packages in Python, there are limitations. It doesn't support all the libraries that Python has. Microsoft BI only supports a few, like three or four libraries at most. When I want to use my old code in Power BI, it doesn't handle it, and that was also annoying.

In the next release, it'll help if they added a coding area where you are more open to make custom things. Especially for a developer, it needs to be improved. For a Power BI person, it's fine, I think, because it doesn't require much technical knowledge, but a developer will need it. Maybe they should create a space for that.

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The build in Report Builder for end users needs improvement. But for someone that has some training on SSRS, its very straightforward.

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We have been using it only for a couple of months, and we are at the beginning of our learning. The area of improvement is difficult to say. The handling of the workspaces can be made more granular for user access rights. It can be managed a little bit better in terms of the connection to Active Directory so that we have more granular access rights. I am not sure if this is really possible or if we can solve it differently, but we need a lot of workspaces, and we are not sure how we can deal with it from the access rights perspective.

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Microsoft BI can improve some of the visual level filters or visual functionality, that are available in other BI tools, such as Tableau or Qlik Sense.

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Sometimes while developing, the front end is not easily customizable and it has limitations. We cannot go and do any UI we want. We have to stick to the limitations of the product.

It's user friendly, but it does have its limitations. A designer cannot dream of anything they want to do and just go and do it. The dashboard has to look a specific way. If we can make the front end more flexible, that would be good because it's on the server. Clients are asking for a better UI, but it has its limitations.

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I'm not a heavy Power Bi user. I use it as my CRM, and it gives me all the information that I need. I haven't found anything that isn't useful for what I'm working on at the moment. Maybe later, I might think of something and find that Power BI doesn't have. It's quite an improvement compared to using Microsoft SQL for business intelligence. 

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You need to purchase upgraded support separately.

The marketing will need to increase more now. Power BI is a good product, however, from Microsoft, and I'm not getting too much marketing information about new features or anything like that. People don't know the capabilities and they really should.

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The biggest thing with Microsoft right now is better support. There should be more timely support. We can do 90% of it ourselves by the same token. When we're into the 10%, we do not get timely support via Microsoft's support team.

Its speed can also be improved. They should come up with a fix for the speed issue and give us some good parameters as to what would help with the speed. They should give us a good white paper that has a compatibility list, similar to what they provide with operating systems, and that describes what you should have before you use Microsoft BI.

There should also be a better way to possibly do things like geolocation, and where they do it, they should do it better. If you have a satellite, offices, and that sort of thing, it would be nice to see it in Tableau and different formats.

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They can improve it in terms of rule-based security. Currently, it has very limited rules.

They can improve the user interface a little bit to make it more user-friendly. When creating a dashboard, it is not very user-friendly. You have to click on a certain style and use your keyboard keys to move it. You cannot drag and drop it. 

Their technical support can be better. They normally take too long to escalate and resolve a case.

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I have been doing trial and error to figuring out how to do the data analyzing and modeling. There could be some improvement to simplify it.

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The only real need is a lower tier pricing plan around premium. It’s a big step-up unless you have a very large user base (1000).

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Microsoft has made a lot of progress with Power BI in the past couple of years, but there is still some room for improvement. For example, Integration is one area they could work on. They are adding more integration with other Microsoft tools, but I would like it if they sped up the process.

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There's always room for improvement for Microsoft Power BI, especially for the UX and the menus to make it more accessible to business users. These improvements wouldn't be too technical.

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Every tool has room for improvement. Microsoft also has a lot of room for improvement. If you look at the new tool, even though they promised that you could do data modeling, that you could do everything from the Power BI side, if your data is really large in volume, sometimes it doesn't work on the Power BI. More feature testing from their side would certainly help users.

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Microsoft needs to do some more research and development to make it more stable.

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The solution could improve by having more options to manipulate the views of the data on the dashboards. I sometimes need to make them myself but there should be more customizable with drag-and-drop elements and filters on that data differently than it was designed. There are filters in the design stage but there are times you need something else other than how it was designed. For example, if you did not have some of the information at the time of the design. Having the ability to design, or request the data from the database as an end-user is very important. It would be beneficial to have more autonomy on the design of the requested data. You are not able to change the fields or the request data because it was done in the backend and you are not able to see how that request happened. Sometimes you need to make your own requests or have different requests regarding the data. We do not have access because we are not administrators.

In the future, Microsoft BI can be better by increasing user-friendliness.

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At the enterprise level, it is a little expensive. To get the full capacity of integrations, you need to go premium.

It has limited performance capabilities in terms of connecting to large transactional databases, but it is fine for simple and quick queries from Excel spreadsheets or one table. The premium level is going to be more applicable for the higher transaction-level databases. 

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It should be more scalable for an enterprise-level implementation. When you deploy large data sets, the response has to be faster in Power BI. This is one thing that needs to be improved in it.

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I would like to be able to use SQL properly within the reports and allow multiple people to work on the same report at the same time. If one person is working on it, then it causes issues for anyone else wanting to make reports. We want to condense some reports, so they work for all departments, and not have a version for every single department. Also, I would like to have formulas easier to complete and create. Having its own system means something new to learn, although saying that, it's not hard to pick up this information. 

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The robustness of the stack could be improved as it fails when we import/extract large amounts of data.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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It should have more integrations.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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

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I would like to see the usability improved with Microsoft BI. Microsoft BI has its own challenges in terms of user interface and how quickly somebody can learn how to use it.

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The DAX in Microsoft BI is quite difficult. 

The DAX is where the soft data is accessed. The DAX command is used for coding.

I would like to see the DAX simplified, and the number of pages in Microsoft BI should not be limited to one. You should be able to scroll endlessly left, right, up, and down. Typically, Power BI has a page. On this page, the limit could be eight or ten objects that fill the entire page, and you must proceed to the next page. If possible, I'd like Power BI to do the scroll up, scroll down, with unlimited scrolling on one page.

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I can't speak to any missing features. We haven't used it that long and I haven't come across anything that's stood out as needing to be fixed. 

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

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

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

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When you go to the cloud, its licensing is not intuitive. It is a little bit complex. When you have to purchase a new license, it is difficult to understand on their website what exactly you need to pay and how you can group. It is something that is applicable to all Microsoft products. They're not always so simple and clear when it comes to licensing.

Their support can also be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. They are able to resolve the issue, but they can be better at explaining the approach they took to resolve the issue.

It could have something in the direction of machine learning. It can have some kind of integration with machine learning where you can ask for some reports with natural language.

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We have yet to implement the solution completely. We're still exploring features and capabilities. It's too early to discuss items that may be lacking.

It seems that the solution could use more analytics to help users draw more contextual business insights. Right now, you need other solutions for that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I would like to see a more user-friendly interface with Microsoft BI. Microsoft does regular updates, new features are added every month or so.

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The UI is the main improvement that could be made. Specifically, there is something called DAX, in Power BI, which is complicated compared to calculated fields used in Tableau. 

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The maps in Power BI could be improved. You deal with many maps over the years, like maps of America and Saudi Arabia. The maps aren't detailed enough, and there aren't enough visualization tools. Whenever I want to use a map, I struggle with choosing the right visualization.

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I would like to see a change in the premium capacity. It is very costly, particularly for the Egyptian market, amounting to $5,000 per month. Perhaps in the Gulf this would work well. The data flow should be enhanced from OnPrem-Gateways, which we find to be somewhat complicated and which does not always work. Regional pricing is the main issue. 

The stability is okay, although there can sometimes be an issue with the connection when it comes to data OnPrem and the need to manage gateway communication and do troubleshooting. In brief, there are certain issues with OnPrem stability. 

'Although we feel the solution to be a dream, it would be great to see everything on Power BI services, obviating the need for Power BI desktop. I hope to see such Power BI implementation. 

I feel like we don't have a very powerful ELT or ETL tool when it comes to power and data cleansing. The solution compares unfavorably with such products as Informatica in this regard.

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Microsoft BI's visualization could be better. Though Power BI's visualization has steadily improved over the years, it's not on the level tools like Tableau and SAS or some of the more expensive products on the market.

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The solution could improve the extraction and transformation of data. For example, you transform the data and then send it to Microsoft BI without having to use your own API. We are only providing the API to Power BI, and then Power BI is doing the job.

In an upcoming release, Microsoft BI should increase the functionality of the solution.

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It is not the right tool to do deeper analysis or predictions. When you have some data and you want to do some deep analysis, there is no feature to help you with this. 

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I would like them to provide a license that just allows us to see dashboards. What I don't like about this solution is that in order to just watch a dashboard, you need a license. Currently, you need to purchase a full license of Power BI Pro just to see something, which is not attractive. If you have a license, you can see a shared dashboard, but you can also build a dashboard or you can collaborate with other people. However, if you only want to see a dashboard, there is no license for that. I only want to see the dashboard, and I don't want to do anything more than watching the information on the dashboard. There is no license that allows you to see a shared dashboard. This is one of the areas of opportunity because I would like a lot of people to be able to see a shared dashboard, not to interact with it or to collaborate online with it. 

I would like to see more compatibility with non-Microsoft data sources. Given the fact that everything is related to Microsoft Azure and all services available on Microsoft Azure, I see that they're building more connections to Microsoft Azure services instead of other non-Microsoft services. I understand the strategy, but it would be good to have more compatibility with non-Microsoft data sources.

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I would like to see a feature that connects with a Machine Learning platform like a RapidMiner or Azure Machine Learning Studio. It would be great to have a Machine Learning application link to connect. 

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One thing I would like to have is the scripting language, as they already have within Excel. It's already within a Microsoft business product, because Excel is the number one business product out there. So it would be nice to have the scripting capability in order to automate certain processes.

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Microsoft BI could improve by allowing large-size data sources. We have large data sources, and we have problems loading them in Microsoft BI.

I would like to see in a future release the ability to create rules with no code. Similar to drag-and-drop solutions, or some other way with no code.

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The default parameters of the prompt could be improved by including a dynamic option. We are unable to select any default parameters or it is not dynamic, so we must manually select that prompt value. For instance, there is a year prompt, and if it needs to be changed, someone will have to open Microsoft BI in edit mode to update it. If you have a dynamic option, it makes things a lot easier.

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I would like for there to be some type of user manual that shows steps on how to navigate the solution.

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There is no column-level security in Microsoft BI, and this is a feature that most of our customers are looking for. That is something that should be implemented.

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It is easy enough. I don't see any real substantial improvements that are needed. It is great as it is, but its interface could be a bit modern.

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We'd like the solution to be more scalable. 

We'd like the ability to manage it on the cloud, as a cloud-based solution. It is running out of business as it is not able to keep pace with the big data. Big data is not something that BI can support. It cannot be scaled that much. 

The product doesn't support unstructured data. It doesn't support video, streaming, and strings of files. Microsoft is aware of this.

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I can't say that anything glaring is missing from the offering at this time.

Microsoft is doing a lot of research on it and they're coming up with a lot of good release items.

I'm not overly technical, and so I can't really speak to any shortcomings from a technical standpoint.

I'd like to have more time with the solution to evaluate it to see if there's really anything missing. We don't really go in-depth with the product.

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The charting tool could be improved.

The product could have better analytics capabilities.

The initial setup is not straightforward.

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A few features available in Tableau are not available in Power BI. For example. Tableau has the ability to make up the physical layer and all other stuff at runtime. In Power BI, we have to develop a proper physical layer to connect it.

The limitation that we normally face is related to the direct query mode. When it comes to the direct query mode, most of the functionality is not working, which is an issue for us. We have to use the direct query mode frequently because the client needs real-time data. They should work on this limitation.

There are a lot of other technical things that need to be improved. I am also following the Power BI platform and Microsoft Support Center platform on the web where users have put their requirements. Microsoft is also working on improving this solution. In every update, they add new features to this solution.

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It should be easier to use when there are multiple system sources, and simplify the connections to it.

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There needs to be support for more data sources in DirectQuery.

DirectQuery is a method of connecting your data directly, i.e. any changes in data source will reflect in report immediately. (This is very great feature if you are doing live analysis of your data). As of now there are limited number of Data Sources such as SQL, SQL Azure, which are supported by Power BI with DirectQuery. Although Microsoft keeps working on adding different data sources in DirectQuery (currently only six data sources in this method and three more in Preview), that's why I feel that still DirectQuery (method of connecting your data) has more room for improvement because there are many other data sources that are commonly used by different organization like (MySQL, Access, etc.)

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We'd like to have the ability to relate different reports by common factors from the user side, including relating different reports directly instead of fetching the data to enter into an external tool like Excel or something like that. The reporting needs to be improved. 

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In the next release, I would like Microsoft to include some inbuilt machine learning so that it becomes point-and-click, rather than us developing models out of API and BI connecting to that and getting the results. That process gets in the way of continuity.

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Power BI could have better metadata management. It's easy to use for a single person. However, it lacks an enterprise-grade metadata management system, which can be a problem if you're doing an enterprise deployment with multiple users. Microsoft could add some more features to its normal reporting capabilities.

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Defining a relationship was very confusing. There were circular directions for which I had to do a lot of adjustments in the data. They can do something to make it easier.

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Compared to other applications, like Tableau, Microsoft BI doesn't have as many functions that allow you to do a more in-depth analysis and represent the findings. I think they have a standard that they keep to.

As the UI experience is always changing, the interface and security can always be improved. 

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They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. 

They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use.

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License fee structure.  Mobile reporting Services is only available for the "Enterprise" addition of SQL Server 2016.  This comes with a hefty price tag.  Would be better if you could pick and choose the features you require and then the price tag is set accordingly.  Rather than paying for the full Enterprise addition and getting a lot of features we do not need/use.  

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One area for improvement in Microsoft Power BI is serviceability. If I compare this tool with Tableau, there are a lot of things which I cannot do in Microsoft Power BI that I can do in Tableau.

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The integration in Microsoft BI could improve for other solutions, such as Oracle DB and PostgresSQL. Additionally, the reporting from the databases to Microsoft BI should be in real-time and the overall performance could be better.

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The user interface could be a bit more intuitive. Some parts of the user interface could be a bit more intuitive so that it's a bit easier to use.

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Power BI's administration could use some work, and the user experience needs to improve because it is a client-based tool. If you want to generate a model or report, you need to use client tools, but client tools are limited for end-users who don't have enough hardware. For example, maybe a client lacks enough memory or CPU power for report generators. If you use a model that requires a massive amount of data, your client will face several problems.

We are using an embedded BI because we are using it to report a portal, and this portal includes some screens that come from Power BI, so the embedded BI needs to improve. It would also be helpful if Microsoft made AI and ML capabilities available for private cloud users.

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I can't speak to any missing features. It has everything we need.

The reporting could be a bit better. It would be nice if there was just a bit more flexibility.

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The admin view could be improved by making it more simplified to manage a users' activity and other things. That would be quite helpful.

It could be more user-friendly in general.

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The one thing that I noticed specifically was the graphical features, and some of the analytical features. They were stronger on the Tableau side.

There are two areas where the solution can be enhanced. One is natural language, where you can have third parties, however, it would be nice to have it built-in within Power BI, where a graph could be automatically explained in whatever language so that somebody can just kind of read through and have the graphic as an extra for exploring. That's something that I was looking at.

The other is the explained data, which is more of a lineage-type feature. My understanding is Tableau has that feature and Power BI doesn't. I was looking at a graph of comparisons and I noticed Tableau had this explained data feature, which gives, some lineage where data has come from, and Power BI doesn't have that. Or, if it does, it's not as well developed as Tableau.

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There are some problems with the functionality of this solution. The dashboard is not very user friendly and is quite complicated. They need to make it easier for developers because they could bring key components into the dashboard. I have found using scripting language in other competitor solutions easier.

Since I am new to using this solution I am not sure what should be in a future release. I probably do not need all of the features in this current version.

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I would like it to be a little bit more secure when I'm using the design feature on my desktop. For example, to have the ability to set up security passwords for opening the file. Currently, they don't have that.

Tableau, for example, has a visual way of doing data processing steps, whereas the Power BI system still has some code, although it is very low code. It would be great to have the kind of view that Tableau has.

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I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited.

I would like to see an option for adding audio to the visualizations. 

They need to add support for putting emojis into the dashboards.

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They should add mobile access.

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The performance of Microsoft BI could improve for large datasets and it would be beneficial to have more visualization features.

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Areas for improvement would be the construction of reports and the dashboard budget.

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I have a little problem with Synapse Analytics because it's very new. It's a product that has many capabilities, but it is not very well developed. I have to see the list of permissions from one object. I can't do this in Synapse.  I have to search on the web for a solution because I don't have the tool for it.

The engine of Synapse Analytics and the ability to export the data that has been published to the web could improve.

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I have found using Microsoft BI is not easy. For example, trying to use the auto-refresh feature is not simple.

If you like to use Microsoft BI as an embedded solution, you need to do many things in the Azure, BI, and 365 portals. it can be complicated. This whole procedure should be simplified.

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The formatting template could be improved. In order for me to easily do visualizations, I have to format my Excel spreadsheet in a very specific template. I can't take a spreadsheet from my financial director and quickly put it in Power BI and then pivot into visualizations. I have to first check the formatting, that it's in the proper columns, and headings are logical. It needs all of that database thinking before you can actually get valuable information out of it. 

I'd like to see more templates and better tooling so that when one opens a spreadsheet it's possible to manipulate data from Power BI without having to format the spreadsheet. If you were able to pull the information out of the spreadsheet via more detailed tooling, that would be brilliant.

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It would be better if they had some video tutorials. Most people from an Excel background may struggle with measures in Microsoft BI.

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It should be more user-friendly and simple.

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They are improving it all the time. What would be nice is if they could respond to feature requests more quickly. They can provide faster support for new features.

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Its price could be better. Its licensing cost is very high.

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The dashboard could be simplified. The service is currently good, but it could be better. If you compare it to Tableau and Qlik Sense, they are doing much better work. The ability of their dashboards is much better. The technical part is easy in Qlik Sense, where we can do some coding. It isn't easy in Power-BI.

Microsoft BI can be more user-friendly. Scalability is also a challenge for us because it's difficult to handle Power BI's dashboard.

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I think that they should improve the mobile application that they have, it's very poor. We generally have a very huge area to cover, to move blocks and data. But sometimes I need a small set of data that I can see in my personal iPhone. But the iPhone solution, and the solution from any smartphone, tablet, etc., is so limited. It's particularly important now when so many people are working from home. Sometimes I need to reply to a call from my support or customer teams, they might be asking for a concession for a customer. I want to be able to look at the data on that customer. I take out my phone and I have no data. It's the worst. I think that if they improve the mobile solutions, it would help me and my team. 

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We were having trouble working with the icons.

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The reporting part of Microsoft BI is rather limited compared to other reporting tools.

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Our expectation is putting BI to work in real-time data collection systems in the maritime environment.

The Automatic Identification System is a great source of data regarding the ships from around the world. From kinematic to static including some commercial data, it streams to the maritime monitoring stations. So, collecting and processing of this data and also, creating useful information are the key factors for our government entity. However, this data is real-time data which means that the process should be done in seconds for thousands of ships. We are forcing the boundaries of the Microsoft BI product right now and wish to see some stream data processing methodologies in the future.

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I'm missing collaborations functionality to operate or to work connected with multiple people on a data source or on virtualization. There should be more collaborations functions, such as in Confluence. We haven't explored the solution sufficiently in this area, but at this time it doesn't look sufficient.

I would want one platform, which can be used for top management meetings where you see and comment on the data. That would be a perfect combination. Everybody has access, sees the status, the data, and the comments, and that will make life easier for us.

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The solution's stability could be improved. In the retail industry, due to issues with information updating and data uploading. Clients may end up pricing items wrong as they could accidentally base their choices on old or wrong data.

The licensing needs improvement. There needs to be a middle option between Pro and Premium versions. It could also be less expensive.

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I would like to have the capability to schedule exports in different versions. For example, if I want to schedule a subscription and attach an Excel file, we don't have this capability right now. A lot of people work on Excel, so being able to export an Excel file as part of a subscription would be an improvement.

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I haven't experienced any issues with it right now, so I can't really advise on that part.

I think because I'm moving more into RPA, I'd definitely like to see integration across the RPA, Power BI, or Tableau platforms because that integration could then make automation and mundane reporting much faster.

You'll always require some more complex reports that the analyst could work on, but the very standard sales reports could then be automated very quickly using Power BI and RPA together.

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SSMS & SSRS.

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Well definitely the connectors, which is always a huge space for improvement in configurations, especially the amount of connectors etc. Also, the graphic designs of the reports needs work as they are still really strictly defined, and with the amount of output, there isn’t space for such a design realization. 

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Microsoft is behind IBM when it comes to security features.

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The interface could be improved.

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The capacity of the solution could be improved. If you don't need all the data it offers then don't download it because the software slows down. 

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The Report Server is pretty expensive on-premise. But as long companies are happy to use the cloud version, that's very cost effective.

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• More graphics and overlays
• More analytic tools
• More interfaces to databases, especially multi-table management

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• Monitoring features: I need Microsoft to provide a set of tools to help me monitor Microsoft's products. For example, when I need to investigate the performance issues of SSIS packages, I do not have a tool, instead I have to write scripts to query data for analyzing performance.
• SSIS Connectors: Microsoft needs to provide more drivers to connect other data sources in a native way, which they are doing very well in Power BI, and that we can connect and process data from JSON, SOAP, SAP, Salesforce, and so on.

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The navigation. The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit. It's user friendly, but you would like to have it even more user friendly.

When you do selections in one tab in Report, and then you move to the next tab, then you have to do your selections again. So one tab as a global, central selection possibility would help.

If you compare to QlikView, there's still a lot of functionality that QlikView has that Power BI doesn't. For most companies, Power BI is good enough, especially if you consider the price tag it's an easy choice. But it still has some catching up to do to match the functionality in QlikView.

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Microsoft SSRS is unable to provide a mechanism where poor performance reports could be prevented to run on production environment. In case if a user creates a report which can cause huge impact on server resources / performance it should not be allowed to run on production server during normal working hours. Alternative that is provided is to use subscription option to deliver reports to particular directory or email them at scheduled time (preferably non-working hours).Microsoft SSRS does not offer any interoperability with Andriod or iPad at this time (need to consider this if you are planning to develop reports for these environments) Microsoft SSRS & SSAS suite is very easy to configure and maintain. You don’t need any license if you are looking to try out Microsoft SSRS; you can simply download and use Microsoft SQL Server Express (with Advanced Services). You can create dashboards, drill through reports, charts, graphs, maps, dynamic grouping using Microsoft SSRS.

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- Active Directory authentication requires an additional login for users without Internet Explorer - Learning curve behind any business intelligence package is quite steep - Price of the SQL Server bundle is potentially cost prohibitive for smaller businesses View full review »

The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script.

Additionally, in the next release, I would like to be able to export thing, such as charts, as a PDF.

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I would rate the stability of Microsoft BI at 70 percent. 

While the solution is scalable, it certainly has its limitations.

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Integration with artificial intelligence would help. Humans take time to review the data and eliminate errors. Artificial intelligence based on machine learning and understanding can bring the same functionality.

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There are some limitations of Power BI. The front end, for example, is not fancy.

The solution should not be used in some cases. 

The cost of the solution can get high.

There is a strong community around the solution that can help users learn about the product and troubleshoot.

When we compare Power BI with other solutions, we can see there are lots of things that should be done. Some things are there, however, they are not working well. Microsoft puts lots of solutions in one place and declares it a complete solution. However, in the practice, you can see that this STK is not working properly or the request is not giving the same results. You discover that when you open a ticket to Microsoft. They will tell you that they are still in development on that product so it will available in the future. 

When you use the Power BI as an enterprise solution, as a consultant, you find out that the product is not fully ready for enterprise. In that way, we suffer a lot. That said,  every version becomes better.

They need to have an analytics suite of some sort.

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In Power BI, it would be ideal if we had the capability to import data with forms or similar methods.

It would be nice to have the ability to have a service price to offer customers of Power BI, without having the customer be part of Power BI, I would say. Maybe that could help us consult the suppliers.

The solution could use a faster speed on certain interactions and a refresh of the dashboards. It can sometimes get a bit slow.

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In general, all the Microsoft programs are integrated quite well, but it could be improved. Also, integration with products that are not Microsoft could be more improved.

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Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions.

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• Sharing reports with non-Power BI users 
• Use of ISO weeks (European) in relative date options.

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Drill-down in dashboards needs to improved. The capability only works in Power BI Desktop today. We need to have an alternative approach today.

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For our reporting services, it would be good to have the capability for email-based subscriptions. I want to be able to change the sender dynamically, without having to rely on running through an exercise passage.

I know for a fact that SAP can do this, dynamic sending for subscriptions. Also IBM Cognos can do it. Why Microsoft refused to do that, that you have to rely on add-on to be able to do that...

Overall, it has performed to our expectation. It's okay for what we want to use it for. But because they keep changing, every now and then, there's a major shift in versions, so we are trying to catch up.

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The solution could improve by providing more free visuals. A lot of them are very nice but you have to purchase them. 

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The solution could be more customizable and you do not have enough freedom on the code.

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I've been working with connecting with the right platforms and we need to use other connectors to link with the data. This would be a nice feature for BI to add in the future. For example, we needed another connector in order to make our Wordpress functional. More options for the connectors are really important for us.

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The performance, the ETL, is not so good. Also, I believe Power BI could improve how to add filters to the visualization dashboard because we don't see an easier way how to apply them. We can't filter the table directly, so we always have to do separate filtering for parts of the dashboard.

In the next release, I'd like to see the option to share personalized validation of the users, let them see one another. I'd also like to see the capacity to get filters in the table.

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We would like it if they added more Python libraries in the Power BI service. For Power BI service right now, you can use Python, but it is limited to a few libraries or a few packages from Python. Other than that, it's an excellent product.

Another area that could be improved is maybe more extensions or more visuals.

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The solution could improve by having more attractive graphical charts.

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Using Docs with Microsoft BI can be difficult and hard to figure out. It has a steeper learning curve at first.

There are some other visuals that are available in the Microsoft marketplace, however, you need to use them via trial and error. There needs to be a write-up about how to use them with a quick guide about the basics of visuals. That way, you would get more of a sense of if it would work for your purposes. Right now, you need to add it to Microsoft BI and then just hope it works, or go back to the drawing board. 

I had one query that came in that didn't have a direct connection it was for Oracle 9 connecting to Power BI directly. They don't integrate directly. You need to do something different or look for something else that might connect them.

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The solution could improve the mobile application design. It is difficult to use compared to the desktop version. Additionally, we have experienced a problem when attempting to update the desktop application. When we click to update we are unable to open the file to update.

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The on-premises version lacks some technical features that are available with the Cloud version.

There is definitely room for improvement.

The visualization is lacking, it needs improvement.

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In an upcoming release, the solution could be simplified and have a more complete product package rather than a suite of products that we have to put together.

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The graphic interface could be better.

I would also like to see it mobile-friendly.

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We would like to have better SQL support for queries. It means to have a kind of development environment trying to correct bad sintax in SQL query, or having an intellisense like style for code completion being aware of table's fields and having a preview of the query response without needing to run the whole procedure. 

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The DAX features need some improvement. It's not as easy as Excel. They need more DAX formulas.

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Power BI could be improved by implementing more options for data integration. Nowadays, the cloud takes care of scalability and security. As we all know, data sources are increasing, so we get data from a variety of streams. But if we could get the downstream data into the database and update the reports more easily, Power BI would be better. 

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It's not even fair for me to respond on that as that's not my wheelhouse. I don't know how easy it is as I'm not doing any of the designs. Therefore, I have not had any real training on it. I don't think that's fair for me to criticize anything that they're doing.

The initial setup is a little bit technical and what an end user wants to see is always a moving target.

The solution needs better technical support.

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The paginated report functionality, which was intended to replace SPSS, is not yet up to the mark. We would like improvements made to the paginated reports so that it produces quality similarly to SSRS.

There is no automation for paginated reports, so then need to make it automated.

Ultimately, I would like to see all of the features from SSRS that are missing. That's ideally what I would like to have.

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More connections with other systems should be added, which would allow for other integrations.

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It is definitely a wonderful analytics tool. However, database ETL, data integration functionality would be absolutely perfect in many cases. Currently, it doesn't get the job done and we need to extract, transform, and load the data from faulty data sets into something more suitable for the deployment of the analytics tool.

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They need to make it as user-friendly as possible. Make it as non-technical as possible. At the moment, if you are not a person who is familiar with modeling analysis, it might be a bit scary. So I think it should be a very simple user interface. It should be very easy to learn. 

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The solution could benefit by allowing deeper data analytics.

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I would like to see some AI incorporated into this solution in the future.

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The possibility to synchronize more often without having to pay more would be great. They asked you to pay if you want to synchronize more than eight times, you would have to go to a Power BI enterprise license, which is much more costly.

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Its performance and stability can be improved. It takes time to load, and sometimes, it also breaks down for the whole region.

Its usability could also be better, and it could also have more connections with different data sources.

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Real-time updating needs improvement.

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• Dependency on data warehousing and pricing.
• Clarity on the Power BI (free) compared to Power BI (pro).

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The few things I mention below constitute very strong reasons why Microsoft has essentially abandoned the platform and why I agree with them.

• Lack of mobile support. Reports look terrible on mobile screens. They don’t have the ability to redraw themselves as with responsive UIs. Security remains a hassle on mobile because SSRS relies heavily on Active Directory.
• Speed of development is too slow. To be fair, each SSRS report has the potential to be its own business application, aware of who is viewing the report and customizing the output accordingly. Those that take advantage of the advanced features are in for a surprise – developers will spend countless hours squinting at the screen getting every pixel to fall exactly where they want it. Setting up data sources is still a thing for advanced SQL developers. It’s not like other modern BI platforms where stores of data sets are easily converted to dashboards.
• Antiquated IDE for code developers extending it. I really wish that the custom code windows provided richer programming assistance (like auto-complete, object-oriented constructs, Intellisense…) and support for other programming languages.

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I think that automation could be improved and performance enhanced. Documentation for developers could also be improved. 

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The quality of the performance is dependent on the data source. If you have to pull multiple data sources performance is somewhat lacking. 

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I would like to see better, undisturbed stability without any interruptions.

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I think that they can make the solution easy to use for people who are not experts in data because many clients try to use it, but they need to be prepared before using it.

Also, now we have another solution on the market that is more easy to use for those who are not trained in these kinds of tools.

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I am a SAP user and I would like this tool to have more connectors - and to more easily connect to - the ERP or SAP environment.

Also, I would prefer that the solution not be shared. I'm concerned that if we make a mistake we could reveal information to people who shouldn't see it. I would like to have my own on-prem server, to buy my own server and have my own infrastructure for Microsoft BI, with only with my data. Power BI, this global solution from Microsoft, is shared with multiple companies. I would like that the content that I create, my data, be available only for me, not shared with other companies.

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The aggregate functions in SSRS.

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PowerQuery (so long) + smt exists in SSAS cube but cannot do the same in tabular. View full review »

There are areas where BI lags behind its competitors - for example, Qlik has an in-built data manipulation engine while BI does not. I also do not like transformation in BI, as we have to go back to the data for this process instead of being able to do things on the fly, as with Qlik. Other areas for improvement include the language that BI uses, the ability to do data manipulations, and the flexibility of the licensing models. In the next release, I would like to see manipulation and internal analytics, as well as some analytics features.

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When there are large amounts of data being processed there are additional tools needed to handle it.

In an upcoming release, there could be an associative experience, such as in Qlik.

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The smart phone application could be improved, along with better graphics and faster updating.

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Once the report updated, we want the system to send a notification to user automatically. Especially if the email can imbed the dashboard data into the email, instead of a link. This does not necessarily happen.

In addition, importing the dashboard to a powerpoint is not available in the report server.  Even though we go to the public cloud service, the export is only the picture, or a snapshot of the dashboard. We cannot play the features or see the data we could change in a powerpoint. This is frustrating  because sometimes the finance manager needs to export the report to a powerpoint. Actually, we wanted to export because we wanted to do the presentation. We wanted to show the figures or something like that, but those figures are just static, and are only a picture.

Finally, an additional feature should be added to add a cost table.

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Perhaps the inclusion of ETL functionality would help.

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Its ease of use feature is not very intuitive and needs to improve.

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Performance can be better; of course, it depends on your hardware but it can also be improved.

Once I tried to upload 5 million rows on Power Query from a CSV file but I got an error about my personal computer, i.e., my RAM was not enough for uploading. Also, sometimes this process takes a long time.

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To add-in the functionality of AI into the reporting, so this can improve further on the product as it is currently. The BI reporting still relies on historical transactions.

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SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is not user friendly, requires development. Power BI will surely provide a huge boost to MS BI in terms of self-service BI. Then again, SSRS developers are plenty, thus not so expensive.

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• Data warehousing manager is not available, which can be introduced
• Reporting or SharePoint needs a lot of learning so you can build reports

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End-user tools such as Excel is not good enough for all business scenarios.

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I think creating dashboards could be easier. Compared to other solutions, the cost of the license is expensive and that could be improved. 

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The integration with third-party products could be more stable.

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Adding paginated reports to this tool could be of great help for users who want to move away from SSRS. 

I would like to see built-in Git support, incremental loading of data, and a machine learning model for predictive analysis.

Custom colouring from the dashboard itself would be helpful.

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I would like to see Machine Learning for Power Bi Pro users or an intermediate license to enable Machine Learning if you don't have access to a Premium account.

The minimum embedded capacity for Machine learning is currently an A3 capacity, and this should be reduced to include A1 level licenses.

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It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved.

Also, we post NGDP data and manipulating this kind of data could be better.

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The following areas could be improved:

Publishing and sharing data using PowerBI.

People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training.

It's not always easy to speak directly with a MS Power BI expert.

You have to sign up to the Power BI service using an email address to share and view Power BI reports and dashboards, but Microsoft doesn't yet support personal (.cox, .gmail, et.) or government (.gov, .mil, etc.) email addresses.

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There is need to improve the graphical and dashboard reports; they must have tabs. This gap is usually compensated by QlikView.

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Microsoft has poor support for XML.

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The solution could improve by simplifying the user interface and adding integration or compatibility with APA.

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• Delta update
• More than 10 GB of space
• Single sign-on
• More than 30 Windows to update by Power Bi gateway.

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• Reporting and analysis tools require additional skills rather than basic database programming such as Reporting Definition Language which may be a challenge for inexperienced developers. • The installation requirements are quite demanding and only computers with relatively high processing power and large primary memory are able to run some SQL Reporting and Analysis tools. View full review »