Microsoft Power BI Reviews

My company uses Microsoft BI's dashboards. We build them for the business and the operations team. We have four to five customers using this solution.

The dashboards of Microsoft BI are easy to use.

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.

I have been using Microsoft BI for four years.

Microsoft Power BI is stable compared to any other business subjects or any other tools.

Any Microsoft project is scalable. 

Technical support has been good.

We have used QlikView. Microsoft BI's dashboards are easier to use and not as complex.

The initial setup of Microsoft BI is straightforward and easy to install. We install ourselves.

I would recommend Microsoft BI. The dashboards are not that complex and are easy to use. 

I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10.

I am surveying and researching this solution, in order to provide it to my customer.

Microsoft BI is used to create a dashboard or reports in the customer's environment.

I implement Power BI on desktops for my customers to use for sales and financial analysis. The customer must purchase Power BI Pro from their company, and then they can use it.

The virtualization of Microsoft BI is very good.

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.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for a few months.

The price is good. They have a free Power BI Desktop version, but it has limitations.

They also offer Power BI Pro at a reasonable price. Power BI Pro is appropriate for large enterprises with at least 500 users. The price may be very expensive per month. 

The pro version is not suitable for the majority of my customers, who have five or ten users.

If you are a single person using this solution, I would recommend using the desktop version. Power Pro can be used for multiple users ranging from 20 to 50, eliminating the need to invest in Power BI Premium.

Maybe, in the long run, I can be a Microsoft partner, but first I need a large number of customers.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

The stability is good.

It's pretty easy to set up the product.

For the most part, users can scale the solution.

Technical support is okay.

It's a great option if a business is already heavily involved with other Microsoft tools. 

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. 

I've just started with the solution. I've used it for under a year so far. 

The solution is stable and the performance is pretty good, From what I have experienced. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

That said, we haven't used it for a full year yet, and it's hard to gauge its stability for the long term. Right now, based on the information I have, I'd rate it at 70% stable. 

While, for the most part, it is scalable, it still has its own limitations. 

We have three customers that currently use the product.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. They are okay. I'd describe them as average. We haven't necessarily had a bad experience. 

I wasn't directly involved in the implementation process. From the feedback from the engineers working on it, in terms of if it is an easy installation, t's not that difficult. The difficulty level depends on the experience of whoever is installing. It depends on the experience of the guy behind the installation or the software guy. My understanding is that there is no difficulty region to region. 

We have about five people who can handle deployment and maintenance duties on our team. We have a mix of managers and admins. 

We are able to handle the implementation process for our clients. 

The client does need to pay for a license in order to use the product, however, I can't speak to the exact lengths of license agreements on offer or how much they cost. 

Beyond the standard licensing fees, the only other extra cost would be support. 

There are other options, however, it depends on the client's services. If clients have already made up their minds and they know what they want to go for, we simply help implement. We can give them more options of solutions to choose from. However, many prefer Microsoft as most of their other applications are already Microsoft. It makes sense to stay within the brand. 

I'm an integrator and reseller. 

I'm not the one in charge of the installation or the technicality of the product. I'm more on the business side.

I always let clients have options and guide them to go for the one that best fits what they want to achieve. Other solutions have areas of strengths and weaknesses. You need to look at everything and examine everything before making a decision. 

Currently, I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. We haven't yet used it a year, and we're still learning about it and seeing what works well for clients. Over the next few months, we'll likely have a fuller picture of the product.

We use Power BI for a variety of applications, including retail analytics, sales, and process digitization. Except for time series data, we use it for everything. 

We have both deployment options open, so we have the requirements for both on-prem as well as on the cloud. 

One of the most valuable features of Power BI is the ease of use. It is comfortable and there is not a steep learning curve for this solution. If you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas, you can use this solution comfortably. 

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. 

I have one year of experience with Microsoft BI. 

Power BI is stable. I have not used it extensively, but from what I understand from my colleagues, it's stable. 

Power BI is scalable. In my organization, there are probably 400 or 500 companies using this solution. We are probably going to increase our usage. 

I have no idea whether the installation process was straightforward or not, on the admin side. As for the technical team required for deployment and maintenance, I would say you need maybe one or two admins. The development is based on use cases, but on average, I would say you need some 10 to 15 BI developers. 

We pay for licensing for Power BI. 

We are also using MicroStrategy. I did not like the drillthrough feature in Power BI, but I liked it in MicroStrategy. The way visualization works, I found that the interactiveness of MicroStrategy was better than Power BI. Similarly to Power BI, you can comfortably use MicroStrategy if you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas. 

I rate Power BI an eight out of ten. 

I would recommend Power BI to those considering using it, but would also recommend that they explore it themselves and understand their requirements. Their requirements will be different, so it's all use case based. 

The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution.

It is quite flexible for reporting purposes.

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.

I have used this solution within the last 12 months.

We are using the latest version.

It can scale easily.

We have more than 50 people who are using this solution in my company. Across the company, most are in marketing and finance.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

We use Oracle BI and Oracle OBIEE.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It would be better if the price was cheaper.

I would recommend this solution and suggest they use it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using it for analyzing transactions. In the products that we develop and supply to our customers, there are some applications that are connected to payments. We analyze the trend of transactions or payments that are done in our system by our clients. We want to understand how our clients are using our solution and if there are some conditions that are making them use our product more than others. We also analyze who is paying and how much, and how and at what time are they using our system.

It is stable enough. It has a lot of powerful functions. It can also be customized with the DAX language. 

It is also intuitive enough and incremental. You can start with something simple, and then step-by-step, you can increase the reports and dashboards according to your needs. 

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.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is stable enough.

It is easy to make it grow as a product. Our organization is not big. We have a total of 10 to 15 people who access this solution. We will continue to use it for sure. 

In general, we are producing applications that we sell to our clients in a SaaS model. All data of our clients is inside our database. The clients have to manage the service. All this data that they are loading in our server can have interesting information for them. So, we are using it to understand our clients and the behavior of the user.

We had to use some support for licensing. They were fast enough, but sometimes, they were not very clear. We had a few calls with them. In the end, they solved the problem, but they didn't have a very clear approach. It was more of a communication problem. Their support can be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. 

Its installation is easy on the cloud as well as on the desktop. You can also easily move and publish from desktop to the cloud. We had issues with licensing, but after you have received licenses, it is easy. 

It is also good how the data that is being collected on some servers for different data centers is automatically synchronized. It is easy enough to do automatic scaling or collect the data from the source and the publisher.

We did it ourselves. At the moment, we are not using a consultant. It is intuitive enough for our use, and there is one type of analysis and one type of role. However, in the future, we might require a consultant for customizing the dashboard and the reports and splitting the data according to different roles. We would require analysis of different roles based on different sets of data. For machine learning, we'll surely require a consultant.

For its deployment and maintenance, we have three or four people for each specific competency. Some of them are more experienced in the data that has to be collected, and some of them are experienced in how data can be collected from the in-house server. There are also some people who are more competent in the business domain.

We pay for users who are publishing on the cloud. The desktop version is free.

Its licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would recommend this solution. It has many features that are good. It mostly needs improved licensing. 

I would rate Power BI a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution to run our industry reports. We get the data from data warehouse we are creating. I use it to export the data.

We have been using Microsoft BI for one of the customers. That was completely in the customer environment. That's all. We did not have that solution for us in-house. However, we are working towards introducing it for our own purposes in the near future.

The product is very user-friendly.

The solution can be used with any BI tool you have.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution has been very stable for our customers.

It appears the solution has the capability to scale, although we have yet to try to do so.

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.

I've been using the solution for the past five years now. It's been a while.

The product has been quite stable so far. The performance is good. It's reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

 We have not attempted to scale the solution yet. We are in the initial stage of exploring different features on it. We believe it to be a scalable product, however, we have not attempted it ourselves yet. We might in the future.

We don't have any customers on the solution right now as we are just trying to figure things out.

We haven't used technical support. I wouldn't be able to speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

We are also using Tableau. We use Tableau right now, and we are likely introducing Microsoft BI in-house in the near future. For now, we just have customers that use it.

We found the initial setup to be straightforward. It's not a difficult implementation and I wouldn't describe it as complex. A company setting up the solution for the first time shouldn't have any problem doing so.

We're still in the process of licensing the model. We don't have it set up yet. My understanding is that we will pay for licensing on a yearly basis. I don't have the exact figures in terms of the costs.

Right now, I am looking to do a comparison between Tableau, Power BI, MicroStrategy, and Pyramid Analytics. I have not had a chance to really dig too deep into research.

We are just customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with Microsoft.

We are using the most recent version of the solution at this time.

We're still exploring the solution and haven't fully implemented it yet.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's very user-friendly and so far I have had a good experience.

I have taught and mastered many desktop tools, including Power BI, for the purpose of prototyping designs for business intelligence and data warehousing. Currently, I am teaching data analytics at graduate level and Power BI is on my schedule.

We teach tools like Power BI by going through common scenarios in a business intelligence environment, which most often deal with the factual numerics that get designed into a sales force reporting dashboard or similar solution, showing details like order placement, orders shipped and paid for, etc. The templates for these typically use a style of diagramming called star schema, which is a common dimension modeling technique. 

I can't say whether it's the most frequent real-world use case that a real customer would focus on, but for the level of our tutorials, a sales scenario might involve a description of customers, products, locations, maybe geography, and the timing of sales for trends analysis.

Other than Power BI, I also teach AWS and Azure, where I help guide students to plan and come up with architecture for deploying to the cloud. It's not actually very hands-on, as it's more to help with architecture diagramming for the intentions that students have when using them. And at our institution, all of our courses last only four weeks, so it's very fast tracked, which sometimes means that we don't really go too in-depth.

AWS has a lot of samples and diagrams, including many graphics that are fairly artistically detailed. The level at which I've helped students reference those kinds of diagrams is mainly for their team projects, to illustrate their intention, for example, to deploy a database into AWS. If it's an SQL Server database, we usually choose Azure. But it's not to actually do it. It's rather to have the intention to, for illustration purposes.

I had a brilliant student in May last year, 2019, who did her graduate capstone project - where I was her advisor - using Power BI. And she has two times now responded to my invitation to be a guest speaker on that tool to classes such as the data analytics class that I've been teaching for about 20 times now, going back six years.

At my institution, I'm the only one teaching database design, whether undergrad or grad, and I found Power BI was a very attractive tool to introduce during the database design class, and then later enable the students to use it for their capstone. Unfortunately, it didn't work out in November this year, because few of the students picked up on it and gave the actual time it would take to focus their attention on using Power BI templates.

Overall, my observation is that the enrollment is way down and the students who are still in the program are very distracted, I think because of the pandemic. Despite this, Power BI has helped me introduce students to business intelligence and data analytics because it's a very attractive and cost-effective tool (there's no cost to it, it's free).

Another reason I'm inspired to focus my time on helping students with Power BI is because of the analyses done by the Gartner Group and Forrester Research, wherein they reviewed the strengths of Power BI. Both of them call it a "killer app". That caught my attention. And Power BI seems like the best thing to suggest to the students.

And I'm up to it on my side teaching through online, although I'm regretting that I cannot go on a campus to be still there for the students whose strong preference is to be together in a room learning on site. I hope that in the class in May, there'll be more people really interested in actually using it. In November, I was hoping some of the students would, but for reasons such as the pandemic, these online students have too many distractions. Especially if they're also still working or they have families with kids at home.

What Power BI is, is a whole collection of templates of small amounts of data that can be used to do something for a real world project, that can be easily set up and become the business intelligence environment or a data warehouse for a large amount of data, for a real world customer. That's what is remarkable. And that's what it takes.

It makes use of the ordinary things, and they'll sound familiar. Excel, Access, or SQL Server as the database, and the deployment techniques like Azure for it to be in the cloud.

It's very heavily like Microsoft promoting its own products, but I forgive it because this time it works. And I'm speaking from some experience; I worked in the data warehouse technology group at Oracle for three and a half years, and I was helping Oracle's clients put up a data warehouse with Oracle as the database, and to migrate data into the Oracle database. So that was my background. And for me to be persuaded that this collection of regular, already known, already used desktop tools could work just as well, but with the added value of the samples, the templates, frequent updates, and lots of support. That says a lot.

It also has other features that I like, especially regarding the designs in the set of templates for things that would perhaps be very puzzling to somebody doing it for themselves. It has pre-built tables to hold, during project lifestyle, maybe a small select amount of test data with the intention of the large amount of data going into production after deployment. And it has all the table designs that start out generic but that can be easily customized.

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.

I have used Microsoft BI in my data analytics classes for a few years now. 

In an abstract sense, it's holding up. I don't speak to actual customers of Microsoft products to answer that question. But I would suggest that it's holding up because the Gartner Group put out another magic quadrant output that describes it as being in the leader category.

It's a well-respected research group, Gartner. In fact, companies that want to acquire its research for anything more specific or consulting, have to pay for it and have ownership. I don't pay for it. But there are many vendors who have my school email on their lists, so I get the reports for free, and I have my hands on quite a collection of the reports.

And that's why I'm mentioning them because the Gartner Group has mentioned Power BI twice now. So as far as long-term prospects go, I'd say Power BI is a stable solution.

Microsoft provides frequent updates and a lot of support for Power BI.

I have worked in the data warehouse technology group at Oracle for three and a half years, helping Oracle's clients deploy a data warehouse with Oracle as the database. But when Power BI came onto the scene, I was more and more persuaded to use it instead for business intelligence and data warehouse purposes. This was mainly because I enjoyed how easily Power BI builds on existing tools that I'm already familiar with like Excel and Access. 

The setup is straightforward, because it exhibits itself within familiar tools, like spreadsheets.

The complexity comes when you try to convert from simple beginnings into something that needs to eventually become reality. But I'm guessing. I don't know that it's complex. And anyway, I personally like complex. It attracts my attention.

For my primary use case, i.e. teaching students, the free version of Power BI is adequate.

May is the next time I'll be teaching the data analytics class, the graduate class, and I will be actively trying to promote Power BI for the team project.

I would rate Microsoft Power BI an eight out of ten.