Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We are power industry consultants and we collect line operation data from power plants, preprocess it and then put it into some visualization software such as Tabula or Power BI. We then generate a regular test report for our customers who are power plant operators. 

It provides good visibility to the customer. They can see everything that's going on in a logical and user-friendly way. 

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. 

I've used this solution for two years. 

The Microsoft support is not very good. When issues arise, I use Google or the user discussion boards. 

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward, it's just a matter of downloading the software from Microsoft and installing it. 

The solution is very affordable. 

The big difference between Tableau and Microsoft BI is the price tag which is much higher for Tableau. Tableau also provides a server for web publishing. It means you can easily share the visualization with people outside your company. In that sense, Power BI is more difficult. I also think Tableau may be more secure. 

I would recommend this solution if you're a smaller organization. If you have massive data, like a corporation, then Tableau is probably the product to use. 
I rate this solution six out of 10. 

We use Microsoft Power BI for production testing. We're not using it for production automation. It's being used for testing and testing themes. We have a testing requirement, so we want to mimic automated workflows on production to be validated on regular intervals, and this is how we use this solution.

One valuable feature of Microsoft Power BI is that it's user-friendly. It also has good connectivity between multiple source systems. It's also a good data analysis tool.

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.

We've been dealing with Microsoft Power BI for five to ten years now. We were early adopters of cloud solutions, e.g. AWS and Azure, which we adopted from the start. We are a complete cloud company.

Microsoft Power BI is a stable solution.

I find Microsoft Power BI scalable.

It's very easy to deploy Microsoft Power BI.

Microsoft Power BI has reasonable pricing.

We evaluated Microsoft Azure.

We use Microsoft Power BI. We also use AWS, but what we primarily use is Microsoft Power BI.

We're using a combination of deployment models for this solution, because the model will depend on the customer need.

We don't procure this solution and other Microsoft tools for ourselves. It's the customer who procures them, and there is not much issues for us to contact support. We are a Microsoft company, e.g. we are partners with Microsoft, so we have good rapport with them.

We recommend Microsoft Power BI even for large enterprises. It's a tool that could be used even by smaller enterprises and by end customers.

My rating for Microsoft Power BI is an eight out of ten.

We have both deployments for Microsoft BI, cloud, and the on-premise.

We are using SAP BI and Microsoft BI to augment the other.

Overall Microsoft BI is meeting our needs.

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.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately three years.

Microsoft BI is stable.

I have found Microsoft BI to be scalable. We did an enterprise-wide deployment and every one of the 500 people in the company uses it.

I have not needed to contact Microsoft or the local vendor.

We use SAP BI in parallel to Microsoft BI currently. Our plan is to replace the SAP BI with Power BI. The phase we are in now is to run both of them in parallel and see how everything is operating before we completely phase out SAP BI. The focus isn't on SAP or Power BI. It used to be our SAP BI solution. Since we started using Power BI, the plan is to actually discontinue SAP BI. maybe by next year we will no longer use the SAP BI.

I switched to Microsoft BI from SAP BI because, in my part of the world, it is becoming the most popular BI tool. Additionally, the ease of integration and our organization is a Microsoft shop. Everything is Microsoft, our databases, our ERP, and we use Microsoft dynamics and Business Center. 

The ease of integration of the BI tool is important for our organization. The scalability and then the licensing are good. If you choose the cloud for SAP BI, you have to spend more. The planning modules sometimes do not come with the package and you will need to spend on it.

It is not necessarily that Microsoft BI is better, but because there are other benefits when you consider Microsoft BI. The ease of integration with the DB and the ERP, and then you look at the overall cost.

The initial setup is simple to do.

We did the implementation ourselves. The solution does require maintenance.

The price of Microsoft BI is reasonable. Other solutions such as SAP Cloud are more expensive.

We pay annually for the license of the solution and we are using a premium license.

The choice of a BI tool is relative. If you have the capacity and the budget, you could decide to use SAP BI. There are other BI tools on the market. Why did we choose Microsoft BI is because of the nature of our business environment, the nature of your data, and many other factors that have to be considered.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of then.

I am a Power BI technical senior developer and consultant and I use Power BI to provide solutions for my clients.

Everything that's in M Query and DAX is the heart of Power BI because with these tools you can make up for a lot of other missing features. When I say "missing features", I mean it in the sense that, even if you don't have a direct feature to do something, there are quite a few workarounds that you can figure out with DAX and M Query to make different situations work. I think these two are really the soul of the tool because they make a lot of impossible things possible.

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.

I have been in the BI world for about six or seven years now and for the last few years it's all been Power BI for me.

Their support is a little slow in the sense that when I post a question to them, I don't get a response as fast as I'd like. Unless you're a premium user and you've got a dedicated technical support team — that's a different thing.

When it comes the usual Microsoft bugs, they generally don't come up with solutions too quickly. And many a time they don't even have a running solution; some bug fixes will probably only be part of the next release. Even then, however, the new releases are themselves often not terribly stable. Whenever you get a new feature, you almost know that this one's not going to work as perfectly as you would want it to. So you just have to wait for the next one, and that's what it is. It takes a little while to stabilize. This kind of thing, along with their support in general, can probably be sped up a little bit.

I am certified in MicroStrategy and have worked with it for several years. However, most of the business I am getting lately is all Power BI.

In my experience, everybody is switching from either MicroStrategy to Power BI or Tableau to Power BI. I'm hearing and seeing this going on in the market, for some very good reasons. I'm no longer working with MicroStrategy, but not because I don't like it. It's simply that I'm not getting enough work in that area.

Setup is very easy. In Power BI that's one thing you will find across the board when using it. It is very easy in terms of getting something done. Even complex things can be done in a pretty easy way and there's no complex challenge in it.

The pricing is good. It's pretty competitive because I have worked on a few other tools as well, and Power BI is on the cheaper side.

That said, many times people are attracted by its affordable price tag, but then they see that it doesn't do everything they want and they conclude that that was the reason why it was so cheap. There's a problem with this kind of thinking, because even though it might not have everything, the price is still on the cheaper side compared to other analysis products like MicroStrategy. The complete suite of features from MicroStrategy is very costly, but at the same time there's no doubt that it can achieve a lot.

What you get with Power BI is that you start to find that even simple stuff requires a lot of gymnastics to achieve because there's no in-built, straightforward feature for it and you need to come up with a workaround. There are a few too many workarounds needed for my comfort, but otherwise it's a very good tool and it's one of my favorites. The pricing is competitive for a reason.

If you are looking for tabular reporting, then Power BI is not the tool for you. This isn't something that Microsoft speaks much about, and in my experience, if you want to do tabular reporting then there first has to be something in Power BI which can actually take loads of data and print it out on visuals in a tabular way, which is currently lacking. Power BI is really designed for analytical dashboarding and that's what it does best. For tabular reporting, on the other hand, it's better to just get the data exported out into Excel and do the rest there.

I would rate Microsoft PowerBI a seven out of ten.

We have many use cases, from creating full ETL workloads for supporting some dashboards to only building dashboards by themselves. For example, there is one stage where we had to do some data integration from several sources to assess the quality of the data that we are consuming for our projects. We had to ingest data and convert it using Power BI, which is useful but isn't the best ETL tool, and I understand that that is not its purpose. Finally, we built out a schema model and built reports upon that. It's a full project. 

We also have another project, where we are attempting to do some incremental refresh because we are ingesting a lot of data from lake sources and SQL sources. We are doing direct query and applying some optimization from Synapse.

I am currently using the latest version of Power BI.

The most valuable feature is definitely the visual aspect and the DAX capabilities to virtually do anything.

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.

It's stable, but the desktop is not so stable. I have experienced several crashes. I would say there is a lot of opportunity for improvement on that.

A couple of people are needed for deployment and maintenance. You always need a developer who is proficient on Power Query and maybe some other DevOps guy who sets up the pipeline. So, maybe two people at most. It's very easy.

Scalability on the ETL side is not so good. When you run the workloads on service, you can fail almost anything, but it's not exactly the best for scaling.

On the virtualization side, I would say it's good.

I haven't actually needed much technical support. I know there are forums and people respond, but I haven't really sought that out. There is so much documentation online, there are books online, and there are YouTube channels from guys that provide solutions to issues and to some other stuff. The community is very proficient.

It is very easy. Even non-IT professionals use it and deliver value to the company.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

My advice is to just jump right into it, download the Power BI desktop and start looking at YouTube channels. There are lots of people who have made wonderful things on YouTube.

We are Microsoft resellers.

We use it for clients to extract and analyze data from ERP systems. Then, we basically put it in on-premise Power BI, and once we have the reports and visuals that we want, we publish it to different members of whoever has access to see the reports. Basically, we publish it to their Power BI in the Cloud.

For one client, it gives all sales reps across all geographic regions access to sales data, so they know who's purchasing what product in what part of the country, and that sort of thing. It shows them overtime when sales are high and low, as well as what types of customers are buying. We occasionally connect it to external data. We link it to some demographic data, such as population figures in different provinces in Canada, to see how sales are doing.

It is beneficial. It's one of the applications we use for a client's sales reps all over the country to get all kinds of sales data. It also benefits them. They can ask, "Why isn't this customer purchasing this specific product?" So they know which customers are genuine or who are purchasing and may try to push a different line with them. It provides a wealth of useful information to the salespeople.

It gives us, the ability to do a lot of analysis quickly, similar to ad hoc analysis. People want to know, for example, which customers are purchasing which products over what time period. It's very simple to make visuals for them. We create a matrix that resembles a spreadsheet and then link it to various graphic visuals, pie charts, and other types of charts. They also get a visual sense of what's going on. Those features are fantastic.

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.

I have been selling Microsoft BI for two years.

I am using the most recent version.

It can be deployed both on the cloud and on-premises.

For us, the stability has been great. We have no issues with the stability of Microsoft BI.

I believe it is a scalable product. I'm aware that they have other products on the market, but I haven't tried them. To analyze data, it appears to be scalable to fairly large businesses. Scalability is quite good.

It is not a single organization. It's amongst a few clients of mine. I would estimate the number of users to be about 20, 25, or something along those lines. Their roles vary a lot. Several users are salespeople and people in purchasing. There are also people in management who use it and people in the accounting area as well. There are also one or two more technical users who use it to export data to Excel PivotTables. These are the people who make use of it.

For one client, it's very extensively used. Others, I wouldn't say that it is used as extensively. They could use it a lot more.

I have not had any interaction with technical support.

Before using Power BI, we used a lot of Excel, Power Pivot, and other similar tools. We transitioned a lot of our data models from Excel and Power Pivot to Power BI, including the PivotTables. It was a Microsoft solution. It was Excel, from Excel and Power Pivot to Power BI.

The initial setup went quite well. It was a fairly straightforward process. There were no major hiccups.

It took approximately four to five hours to configure.

I have one client who has an administrator who updates the system. He updates the product and his data on a regular basis. I believe the data must be updated once a month. Other clients' updates are handled by me.

We did not need assistance, we completed it in-house.

Yes, I believe so. I haven't actually measured it, but based on one particular client, I believe their company is expanding at a rapid pace. I believe a large portion of it is or a good deal of it is based on the information they receive. I believe there will be a return.

It's straightforward licensing. I would guess we pay $300 to $400 per month for everyone or something along those lines.

Depending on where they're coming from, one thing is that if you want to get deeply involved in it, you have to learn the programming language, which I believe is DAX. It is not difficult to become involved in and learn. Microsoft, in my opinion, has done a good job of making it simple. That's one area I believe people should look into if they want to learn more than just the fundamentals of the DAX programming language. Which we have done in part. Again, we are not experts, but we have looked into it.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten. It does almost everything we require.

We use Microsoft BI typically to clean up data in Excel, as well as to create reports for my supervisor that will be analyzed and then used to draw conclusions.

It provides the common ground for data to be cleaned. We use this for everyone to work on cleaning up data in order to use it for visualizations, which has been helpful.

The transforming data before you start with the visualization comes in pretty handy.

It is quite easy to use and it helps me to achieve the projects that I've been assigned.

I have never had the inability to perform the tasks I've been assigned with the software. 

It's very useful because you can create helpful reports, which assist you to analyze data in a very organized way.

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. 

I have been using Microsoft BI for three months.

We are using an older version specific to the organization.

Microsoft BI is a stable product.

Microsoft BI is quite scalable, especially with the number of coding languages that are available to use.

We have approximately 23 data scientists in our organization who are using this solution. We use it extensively.

We are mostly using Microsoft BI but we are trying to bring in Tableau and maximize the potential of both.

I have not contacted technical support.

I also have experience with Tableau.

When I arrived, this solution was already set up.

For others who want to start using Microsoft BI, I would say go through some tutorials on your own first and then try and practice with practice data sets that are available online. Also, feel free to play around with the different tools, and the different visualizations, because you can use them differently for different things.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

We have a few projects. We're using the solution primarily to develop a modern sitemap.

The product has a very defined, well-prescribed format to it. It's easy for everyone to use for the most part.

The training is pretty good. It's well-described so that users can navigate the solution easily and follow the correct steps to initiate tasks effectively.

The user interface is pretty good.

The technical support on offer is excellent.

We've found the scalability to be quite good.

The solution's initial setup isn't too complicated.

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.

I've been using the solution for a year or more at this point. It hasn't been too long.

So far, the solution has been largely stable. However, I'm still exploring the solution and testing it against my requirements. The stability hasn't quite been proven fully just yet.

The solution is pretty scalable. It meets all of my client's requirements. I'm able to make changes and expand if I need to. It's pretty simple to scale it out as necessary.

We deal, for the most part, with medium-sized companies. We don't really deal with smaller organizations or bigger enterprises.

I'm extremely satisfied with technical support. It's been excellent so far. They are responsive and knowledgeable and I always get my questions answered in a timely manner. I have no complaints about their level of service.

I've also worked with Tableau and SAP products. We use them all currently.

The initial setup is not complex in any way. It's quite straightforward. It was installed quite easily onto our system. We didn't run into any issues in that sense.

I'm using the calculator version of the solution.

We use both the cloud and on-premises deployment models.

We are Microsoft partners. We're not just users.

Overall, I would recommend the solution. We do have other plans to use other BI solutions, however, we haven't really focused on that just yet. So far, this product has met our needs pretty well.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine. We've largely been happy with the product and its offering.