Microsoft Power BI Reviews

It is a good solution. We use it for analyzing and visualizing data relating to warehouses and connections from other ERP systems, etc.

It helps the decision-maker to make decisions related to the data. Power BI is easy to use and user friendly. Because of that, we use it as a visualization tool for our data.

Its data visualization provides the user the ability to quickly look at data and focus on relevant information, allowing them to make an immediate decision.

It is a good product with great abilities and easy features to use.

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

It is stable.

It is scalable.

I watch videos and read training materials. I practice and apply them to circumstances of technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

It is part of our Office 365 license.

I would recommend this solution to another user.

We are not dealing the vendor. We are using it directly from Microsoft as part of Office 365. 

The interactive reports, DirectQuery and integration with the other Microsoft services are valuable features.

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.)

I have used this solution for two years.

In the beginning, we did encounter some stability issues; now, Microsoft is doing great things to make this product more stable and enhanced.

We were using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS reports), now we are moving towards Power BI due to its Publish on web part, as well as the interactive cross-filtering throughout all the visuals (i.e., if you need).

The setup is easy. It is very easy to use. If you are an Excel and SQL user, then it is very easy to get a grip on this product.

We tried Tableau. Although Tableau itself is a great product, we chose Power BI due to its pricing and Microsoft's focus to make it a better product.

We are using it, for instance, to figure out some indicators in regards to our students including the number of students, which are graduating, et cetera.

The initial setup was pretty simple. 

The solution runs without issues. It's been problem-free.

We have found the product very stable and reliable.

The scalability seems to be fine for us. 

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. 

I've used the solution for about three to six months or so.

The stability has been good. There aren't bugs or glitches really. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's pretty reliable. 

For our use case, the solution offers reasonable scalability. We haven't run into issues. 

We have 40 to 50 people using the product right now. They are across different roles. 

I'm not sure if we have a plan to increase usage at this time. We likely will not.

I haven't had a need to reach out to technical support as it's largely been problem-free. I can't speak to how they would be for support. I do not know if they are helpful or responsive. 

We found the initial implementation process to be straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

I cannot recall the exact amount of time it actually took to deploy the product.

I'm an end-user. However, I'm not sure which exact version of the solution we're using. 

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've largely been very satisfied with its capabilities. 

I work in fraud analytics in the insurance industry and use Power BI for broader and high-level reports. We also do some fraud detection, and our output is sent to a Power BI dashboard for various clients to see. It's basically our visualization tool organization-wide.

The most valuable feature is the infinite possibilities when it comes to visualizations. If a particular visualization is not available as a default or in the market, you can just load in a Python nr script and get a visualization from that. It's very flexible in that respect and opens up a plethora of opportunities. The huge number of connectors that are available is also a big advantage - BI can connect to various things, even competitors like Google's Data Studio, and it is even able to connect to various Google data sources and be a powerful alternative to Data Studio. It's also a data modeling tool, so it keeps everything within the app, which is really convenient, allowing the pipeline to complete itself in a more fluid way.

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.

I've been using this solution for two years.

Power BI's stability has improved in the last few years and now seems pretty good, especially with R.

I don't know if BI is directly scalable, but we used a lot of aggregated marks in order to make sure it is able to work with a huge number of roles in the data set. Microsoft demonstrated that they were able to achieve up to one trillion rows, and we haven't got there, but we did get close.

Previously we used Excel, which took a long time - two or three weeks - to bring the data into a uniform format, whereas BI can do the same job in a day.

If you're on Azure, Power BI is tightly integrated with many of the products. And even if you have a non-Azure solution, the family of connectors for data sources is wide, so you can fit it in many places. I would rate BI as nine out of ten.

It depends on what the client needs. I've got multiple use cases for Power BI. There's no single one that stands out. But generally speaking, my clients primarily use Power BI for financial and sales reporting.

Microsoft BI's dashboards are helpful.

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.

I've been using Microsoft BI for about 18 months.

Microsoft BI is stable. 

There are limitations and license restrictions. So if you're an enterprise that needs to increase the volume of data and users, you normally have to go to higher license models.

Microsoft BI is mostly easy to set up. 

At the entry level, it's affordable, but as you scale up and have more needs, it becomes expensive because you get tied into the whole Microsoft stack.

I also work with MicroStrategy. Out of the two, I would recommend MicroStrategy. They have what they call the Semantic Graph and Enterprise-Grade Semantic Graph. I think the technology is fantastic. However, doing business with MicroStrategy is fairly difficult and complex because of all processes involved, but the technology is probably the best in the market.

I rate Microsoft BI seven out of 10. 

I used it to build a simple dashboard. What I did was very simple. I used it to load different datasets. I defined relationships between them and played around with the data by using visuals.

I must have downloaded the version that was really available at that time.

I had to build a simple dashboard in which I had to combine two or three different datasets. They were large enough, so it wasn't possible to work on them easily in Excel. In Power BI, I used the relationship feature, and I was able to store the data in such a way that it does not occupy a lot of space. I could then send the file over email.

Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard.

There is a lot of self-help content available from a lot of different platforms, such as YouTube. So, whenever I faced an issue, it was not difficult. I could always find a solution to the issue I was facing.

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.

I worked on it this summer. I just used it for a month or two.

Defining Relationships can be confusing when you are working with a complex data model. It can result in circular relationship referencing and the interface does not help solve it, or even understand it, in any way. It takes time to figure out a different way to structure the data model and Power BI offers no guidance on that. Online help is limited.

There is a lot of content available online. When I started out, the way I was defining the relationship between the data and the way my model was structured was not very efficient. I spent a lot of time in making it more efficient. So, I would advise others to do enough research. I was learning on the go. If you spend about six or seven hours learning it, it would be much better. Even though it is marketed as something that is easily usable and anyone can come and start using it, there is a bit of a learning curve.

I was very easily able to load the data and conduct an as-is analysis of what is happening, but if I want to do a deeper analysis of the data and break down a variable into different components, I don't know if it is possible in Power BI. I tried to do it a little bit, but it was not easy. So, it is good when you have the data, and you just want to present it and look at it in different ways, but if you want to analyze the data and break down the numbers and play around with the data, I don't know if it is possible in Power BI.

I would rate Power BI a seven out of 10.

We get a lot of chunks of data, especially production data and data based on education — performance-related data. We use BI to analyze the data so we can give feedback to our clients. If they're experiencing problems, we help them find trends, etc.

Within our organization, there are roughly six or seven people using this solution.

Microsoft BI allows us to connect to any database or any dataset. It automatically renders some of the information which makes things a lot easier for us.

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. 

I have been using this solution for roughly four years. 

Stability is quite good. It's reliable.

We haven't had to expand because usually we just wait for the data. However, we do have plans to expand.

On a scale from one to five, I would give their technical support a rating of four. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

I believe we pay on a monthly basis. Compared to what's available on the market, I think we pay a fair price.

I would recommend Microsoft BI to others. On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

It is mostly used for monthly cost reports for our department. We are also using it as a dashboard for giving some overview for management purposes. We are using the latest version.

Its seamless integration with Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Excel, is the most valuable.

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.

I have been using Microsoft BI for almost two and a half years.

Stability is quite good as long as you have proper sizing from the beginnings. If you do the right sizing keeping in mind the current usage as well as future growth, it is good.

It is scalable. We have around 65 seniors managers who use it on a weekly or monthly basis. Some reports are done weekly and some monthly.

I have not contacted them so far. I am from the user side. We contact our centralized IT department for any issues. If they have a technical issue that requires further escalation, they will directly contact Microsoft technical support.

The initial setup is quite simple, but for the product use, you need to have people who have got experience of at least three to six months in using these applications. It took us two months to deploy across the company.

We have a core team that gets training from a Microsoft partner. We then deploy it ourselves. After six months of using this solution, some of the key users get advanced training. 

We also maintain it ourselves. We have around ten people for its maintenance.

It is somewhere in the middle in terms of price. Licensing is quite clear.

We reviewed some other intelligence tools, and we just used them for trials.

I would recommend this solution, especially for the companies that mostly use Microsoft products and ecosystem. I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.