Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Power BI is a great tool for analytics. It is useful if you have a requirement to create a dashboard with self-service capability, along with KPIs, and you want to drill down to the data details.

I have tried SSRS and later moved to Power BI. SSRS requires every analytical feature to be implemented separately. However, with the appropriate granularity of data, you can drill down and drill up easily which gives you a different view of the dashboards. Now with having on-premises availability, it makes this tool even more powerful.

If you are not very technical this tool could be very useful.

The most valuable features are:

• Self service
• Inbuilt analytics
• Custom visualization
• Printing of dashboard helps a lot
• Dashboard scheduling
  
• Easy collaboration with other users on Power BI
• Learning curve for this tool is small
• Dashboard refresh rate can be configured
• Power BI works both on-premises and cloud

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.

I have been using Microsoft BI, SSRS, and Power BI for four years.

I have developed and deployed more than twenty separate customer solutions. I am a Business Intelligence Deployment Specialist. The most significant implementation was to reduce the Financial consolidation time for one hundred and twenty companies into one shareholder report, from thirty days to four minutes.

We help customers deploy and analyze sophisticated analytics models. These models have helped them all to get a better insight into their data and many of them have found very valuable insights that made them more profitable, more efficient, and in some cases changed the direction of the business.

The feature I find most valuable is the ability to publish Power Bi reports, using an embedded link, directly onto a website. Data that is not classified as confidential can very easily be exposed to customers, vendors, or even just visitors to the web site.

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.

It is a good platform for data analysis, organization, and all of the other interim performances that are necessary.

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.

The stability is good but sometimes we need to validate the data. 

Tech support helped us handle the implementation to completion. They were helpful.

I did not find any complexities with the setup. 

We are a Microsoft partner so we did not look at other solutions.

Microsoft BI Stack's best features are as follows:

SSRS – Self-service reporting and powerful subscription service

PowerBI – Self-service BI

MDS – Master data management

SSAS – OLAP Cube

Microsoft BI Stack improved the way our clients in the beverages (manufacturing and distribution) and the agro industrial sectors manage their financial reporting and board pack preparation, from one week to five minutes.

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.

I have been using the Microsoft BI Stack solution for over five years in the beverages (manufacturing and distribution), agro Industrial, and telecommunication sectors.

I have not yet encountered any issues with stability.

I have not yet encountered any issues with scalability.

I would rate the level of technical support as 7/10.

I did not previously use a solution.

The initial setup of the Microsoft BI Stack environment is complex, has many moving parts, and you need to know what you want for outputs to make effective use of it.

All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights.

• QlikView
• Dundas

If you want to dazzle your audience and, at the same time, show meaningful insights, then this is the best tool.

It is good for highly formatted reports.

It helps to create the board report pack for financial reporting.

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

I have used this solution for five years.

The product is stable. At times, it is slow when you use relational database as a data source, however it is fast when you use multidimensional cubes for high volume data.

It’s easy to integrate with the other Microsoft products. However, it is not as easy when connecting to other data sources like SAP ERP.

Technical support is good, I would give it an 8/10 rating.

As implementors or consultants, we use different tools.

The setup was straightforward.

It’s free if you have MS SQL database license. It comes together with SSIS, SSRS, SSAS and other tools.

We looked at other solutions, namely Crystal Reports and Oracle BI Publisher.

It’s cheaper to implement in terms of the licensing.

It works well, especially when implementing the whole stack of Microsoft BI solution including SSAS for data modeling and SSIS for ETL.

All the features are valuable.

We empower users with Enterprise BI and Self Service BI by Microsoft BI.

Microsoft has poor support for XML.

I've used it for four years.

There were no issues, and it has good integration with other Microsoft products.

We do have issues, but we can solve them ourselves.

We do have issues, but we can solve them ourselves.

It's good.

We are more expert than they are.

We used Infobeacon and then we added Microsoft BI to Cognos. We are currently looking for a better product and are evaluating Tableau.

It is easy to implement Microsoft BI.

Several projects we implemented through vendors and most we implemented in house. We are more expert than they are.

We didn’t have another option.

Quality of data, flexibility and the performance of the tool(s) are the critical aspects of BI. Test the critical aspects by doing a proof of concept using a huge amount of data.

We use Microsoft BI primarily for analyzing data to construct indicators and dashboards. We use the information to better understand our business to make effective decisions about our business for the future, such as keeping competitive with other companies.

The most useful features are the ability to connect different databases to Microsoft BI and explore them. Once the database information has been extracted, you have the ability to construct indicators and dashboards from the information.

Microsoft BI is a complete tool, it has all the functions needed for its purpose.

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

I have been using Microsoft BI for many years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We are able to see the users and the capability from the cloud platform.

Microsoft provides good technical support.

The installation is easy. However, there are many options and areas to configure that can be difficult.

I would recommend those wanting to use this solution to take some courses to at least learn the minimal knowledge to analyze and construct indicators. This is a very powerful tool and if you understand it you can get the most out of it.

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

• P&L
• Revenue
• Logistics
• IT services
• Stock control
• Costs
• Sales

• Established a culture of management by indicators.
• Improvement of services
• Greater visibility of results

• Predictable cloud environment
• High performance
• Ease of development and maintenance

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