Microsoft Power BI Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using the solution for 18 months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

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

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

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

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

It's very stable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

The ease of implementation and reliability of SQL Server Reporting Services far exceeded the solution originally implemented with Crystal Report. The Crystal Report Servers (3 of them) were crashing on a weekly basis at one of the companies where I worked.

We were able to reduce costs by consolidating the 3 Crystal Report Servers down to just one server running SSRS (with one backup just in case). The time it took to run some reports in Crystal were exceeding 5 minutes. The same report in SSRS not only was significantly faster (down to 30 seconds) and the licensing cost savings allowed for a quicker return on investment (less than one year).

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

The solution was implemented and still in use to this day to my knowledge.

No. Following the installation guide was a help with setting up SSRS to use single sign on as well as SQL accounts. The overall setup of the server took about an hour. The conversion of over 200 Crystal Reports to SSRS took some more time but was done with one user and completed within 3 months.

No. SSRS has been rock solid and the server never needed rebooting unlike the Crystal Report Servers.

No. In fact we were able to decommission servers and switch to using a virtual server for SSRS.

Customer Service:

Never had to use their support. But, the few times I have had to contact Microsoft, there were very knowledgeable and able to resolve the problem quickly.

Technical Support:

9, see above.

Yes. We used Crystal Reports, see above.

We're using it for sales information and production information. Pushing a report into Power BI makes it easier to use and a little bit more powerful.

We're using the most recent version of the solution.

The flexibility of the program is valuable. We are able to add other information to the reporting information and expand upon it.

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.

We've had Microsoft BI for about two years, and we are using it currently. It's a part of Microsoft Teams.

It's stable. 

I don't know if it's scalable to the point that we want it. It seems to fit where we have it. We haven't really looked at its scalability. We have other tools, but it works well for what it's doing today.

There are roughly half a dozen users of this solution, and it has sales-related information. There is one driver, and she merges the information. So, there aren't too many rules at this point.

We don't have any plans to increase its usage at this time.

It has been good.

That would've been Excel. So, it isn't a switch; it is growth.

It was easy. We had a good understanding of being able to map two programs together. We had a little training, but otherwise, it was good.

The program installation took a few days, but it took weeks to make the intelligence and the company information look right.

We did it ourselves. We had an individual who worked with it in the past. She picked it up very quickly because she was already trained.

We don't need anybody specific for its maintenance.

We didn't evaluate any other options. The use of Power BI just came with the program, and we installed it. We weren't looking for something different. It just was there for us to use.

My advice to others who are looking into implementing this product is that it is important that they understand their information. They have to understand how the program works, but they also have to understand their information for it to work better.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

On-premises

We use Microsoft BI to fetch data from one server in SSMS to another server.

I find many of the features of Microsoft BI valuable, in particular, I use the data flow tasks, look up and incremental loading of data. They have also introduced Hadoop in the control flow task.

I have created particular dashboards for a specific project so that I can show the clients the data related to their needs. Being able to show them a visual of the percentages in a pie chart has been very effective.

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.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for six years.

Most of my experience was with MS BI, with Power BI the difference is mainly in the report sections. It is more user-friendly compared to SSRS.

If you are not comfortable with SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS, there are many tutorials available for MS BI, especially if you are new to the solution.

I would rate Microsoft BI an 8 out of 10.

On-premises

We are using Microsoft BI to do analytics for tax and customs administration at the centralized level, in order to fight fiscal fraud and detect tax evasion

Microsoft BI has helped the creation of a powerful analytical tool able to detect inconsistencies in different customs and tax declarations/returns and thus allow the Tax Administration to have a full taxpayer view from the fiscal point of view. It finally leads to increasing the collected revenues by cross-checking data coming from different governmental sources.

Microsoft BI was choosen among different proposed solution due to the fact that there was a local knowledge by the staff. Its integration with other Microsoft products used by the administration was also taken into account as being easy. The "already seen" effect was ensuring the staff trust; precious when making a big organisational change : we have observed that staff was more confident to stick to something they have already seen in the past rather that a totally revolutionary approach. The self-service tool is much appreciated.

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

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately six months

The solution is stable. we did not yet had any issue.

We have not scaled the solution much. However, we will extend next year the number of users we currently have to 300. At the moment we're only working with a restricted number of users. We will also extend the number of sources of data.

I have not needed to contact technical support.

The initial IT setup was easy, It took two months for the full deployment to complete. It was fairly quick. From the business point of view, of course, the deployment as envisaged with the different data sources and capabilities will take around 18 months.

We used an integrator for the implementation and they were great. They did a good job. We have approximately three people for the maintenance and support of the solution at the IT level and 20 people using it from Business point of view, with potential increase up to 150.

We expect a dramatic increase of collected revenues once the full solution is in place. The ROI should be at break even in less than two - three years of full exploiting the solution.

We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft concerning the license which decreased the cost of the licenses for Microsoft BI. I have found it to be cheaper than other solutions. It is always difficult to compare the Total Cost of Ownership, mainly because most of the big companies do have a very blur licensing system. The most open one seems to be Tableau.

We have evaluated and completed a market analysis of Oracle and Tableau before choosing Microsoft BI. Oracle because already being used for the internal databases; Tableau because its facility of development and deployment.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is to have the use cases well prepared in advance. Additionally, it is important to know exactly what type of analytics, dashboards, and reports they want, we spend a lot of time with this. I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten

On-premises

I'm using the desktop version and collaborating within our company.

As a training company we wish to analyze the instructions as they relate to our customers. Also, we take certain examples for our classrooms, our training.

I consider the solution to be quite good. In contrast to what we were using before I think that Power BI has given us more extensive results. It's more intuitive and it is better for understanding the whole process without much code. We're only using the user interface, not writing code.

We find it to be easier and it provides a better understanding of the results, both for us and our customers.

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. 

I have been using Microsoft BI for one or two years. 

I feel the technical support to be fine. We have all the support that we need.

Having a proper understanding of how the data is modeled poses the greatest challenge. However, someone who has this should find the installation to be quite straightforward. The initial step involves having an understanding of the data model. 

I think the setup is quite easy and straightforward. The solution can simply be downloaded  and used. The most difficult thing involves the distillation of SQL Server, not what relates to Power BI.

From our side we have around 20 people who are responsible for the deployment and maintenance, although I include in this figure not only the technical but all of the administrative staff. We have the trainers and also the people who are working with the technical support to deliver the training.

The cost of the solution is more flexible for us because the desktop is free and we pay as we use it in the cloud.

The customers have licenses of their own. We use their installations to help them with their work. Usually, these people represent new entries into the company and we give them the initial experience to start working with the software.

As I could tell, I feel the solution to be easy. It is very good that all the users, as they use MS SQL, have a product from the same company. It is an overall experience for them to use Power BI.

We are an end-user and a partner to the vendor. We do training and provide consultations to our customers. 

We work with companies, around eight in total, and we deal with their employees. Overall, we are talking about approximately 300 people. We give training to the employees of these companies and also provide consultations. 

I strongly recommend the solution because I think it's a very modern tool and quite easy for all the data analysts and programmers.

I believe that all of the people who we have mentioned so far are quite satisfied with the solution.

I rate Microsoft BI as a nine out of ten. 

On-premises

Our primary use case is to learn what Power BI can do. We also use it to create dashboards and to see what is available for people to use. We see how it integrates with Excel. You can easily get the data into a visualization but also still have access to the underlying data.  

We use it see how we can move away from an Excel spreadsheet but still give the users the correct answers to the questions that they have. I want to move away looking and fixing issues on particular lines and be able to easily answer the questions with visualizations so users can answer the questions a lot quicker and adapt to changes easier.  

I was self-learning it, we don't use it in our organization. We are looking to use it though in the future. We use a different tool and want to see if we can get more questions answered with Power BI. It's linked to Office 365 and Azure, so it would help us to answer some difficult questions and help identify issues/problems so we can find solutions and adapt the model a lot quicker. Going through over 100,000 lines of data takes too long and we need to be able to group the data more to be able to identify what works better, so a pie chart or map will help to identify issues that are not working. 

The drag and drop facility to easily change the data correctly is the most valuable feature. I am happy to see visualizations. It's easier to talk about and make people understand what is going on. But I need a way to work on getting the data showing correctly and be able to drill down into a worksheet like Excel, as people like to know what the top-level information means. It's important to be open and show them what they want. The number of visualizations is great. So many different options to choose from like heat maps to pie charts.

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. 

I have been using Microsoft BI for six months.  

Microstrategy, and no, we have not swapped yet. I use both to keep on top of my own skill set. 

It depends on what you are wanting to do. Get the cost of users, and the servers, and work out if you are hosting, or if it's going into the cloud. 

We didn't as it's a company decision to look to change the BI system. 

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure