Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I've mainly worked within the banking sector. It is particularly useful for vertical clients. Power BI is a great tool for reporting. You can source data from any database, like Oracle or Microsoft SQL. It generates reports and provides methods to control your report's power.

Power BI works with both real-time and offline data. When interacting with real-time data across multiple systems, it offers a great advantage.

I've worked with real-time interactions and appreciate them, similar to how AI is increasingly being incorporated. It's fascinating to see the shift towards AI.

Using middleware technology, like web services, allows Power BI to interact with multiple systems efficiently. This request and response mechanism ensures data is transmitted from the source to the target system in real-time, which significantly benefits business operations by providing up-to-date information.

Moreover, integration capabilities were smooth. I worked on integrating Power BI with PeopleSoft, focusing on custom solutions rather than out-of-the-box features, tailoring the experience to specific needs.

Power BI is very user-friendly and easy to learn. I've even uploaded instructional videos on YouTube, which have helped many users, including some who have become long-term administrators of Power BI.

Reporting is the best thing about Power BI. And it could help improve decision-making in many ways.

Power BI is flexible and easier to use compared to tools like Crystal Reports.

It should integrate with multiple enterprise applications. For instance, integrating CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and HCM (Human Capital Management) with Power BI can be a significant advantage.

Because, organizations focus on and like software that can do multiple tasks.

The user interface is good but it should have the ability to interact with multiple systems.

I would like to see more AI capabilities in future releases. There's a strong interest in AI, including technologies like GPT, which facilitate real-time interactions.

It's all about real-time interaction between customers and the system, automated to operate under specific scenarios. This ensures it functions in real-time, leveraging AI for more dynamic engagements without needing predefined projects or setups, much like how chatbots are designed for real-time use.

In future releases, I would like to see more encrypted software, and there should be version control for Software. It will avoid pirated downloads. 

I would also like to see dynamic content. It should be an add-on in Power BI. It helps users understand reports more easily. For example, when a developer is building a report, they should consider using dynamic content to make the report more user-friendly.

I've worked with Power BI for almost one and a half years, focusing on reporting and integration with Power BI.

Power BI is very stable, especially in sectors like banking, retail, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications. 

Its stability is expected to increase in the future with advancements in Azure.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It's very scalable.

I haven't needed to press for support activities, so based on my experience, it is good in general. 

Positive

Compared to other reporting tools, it is very easy to acquire, demonstrate, and understand.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with ten being easy. 

It is very easy to set up. Security in a private cloud is optimal, whereas public cloud lacks in security. Hybrid solutions offer some balance, but on-premises solutions have a lot of limitations.

Many customers are moving to the cloud for its ease of use, security, availability, and flexibility. Cost efficiency is also a factor. For example, Why would you use the cloud? Say you have 1000 people in your organization, and only 500 need access to Power BI. On-premises, you'd need to buy licenses for all the users. With the cloud, you only pay for what you use.

Considering cost, cloud solutions like Amazon Cloud, GCP Cloud, or Azure Cloud are preferred for their scalability and cost-effectiveness.

So, our customers mainly use cloud deployments.

Deployment doesn't take much time, thanks to it being a Microsoft product, which makes it easy to handle compared to other software.

So, it takes just a few hours.

It's about balancing cost and value. Although Power BI is cost-effective compared to other reporting tools, its pricing should be more adaptable based on the size of the organization to ensure it remains cost-effective for both small and large entities.  For example, if the organization has a million end-users, it should be cost-effective. 

This is important when considering the scalability of solutions like Kronos or Banner ERP systems, ensuring the cost is aligned with the organizational needs.

The pricing is very low and competitive. Microsoft could consider adjusting the price according to the size and needs of the organization, balancing demand with supply.

Power BI is an essential tool for any kind of detailed reporting. It's efficient and effective. 

I would definitely recommend using this solution. Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

I would describe myself as more of a casual user, only because I have so many other things that I have to get done. I wish I could be more of a user, but it's hard. Right now, I have two different main use cases. I use it for teaching. At another institution, I use it for demonstrating how easy it is to build dashboards. It was really to show to all my users the benefit of business analytics. I use it to demonstrate how easy it is to generate your own analytics versus having a department run reports for you then putting it in Excel and making graphs. 

I like the fact that Power BI lets me use Excel data. At least 90% of my state data is in Excel spreadsheets. Having the ability to just attach a spreadsheet as a data source is very, very important. It's also good for training and teaching. Sometimes you don't always have access to a live production database, so having a spreadsheet with sample data is always nice.

The Microsoft BI interface should be simpler and more user-friendly. I find it very difficult to move between their data sources and their analytics section. It's probably designed by data analysts that typically get the data from somewhere else. So, one person logs into Power BI, moves the data around and puts it in the proper form then somebody else goes in from the dashboard. What I'm finding more and more is that the person playing with the data is also going to be the person building the dashboard, so the interface needs to be more seamless and dumbed down for the average user. 

Tableau is much better at that, which is probably why it's more expensive. The days where one person works on the data and someone else does the analytics are coming to an end. In the past, larger organizations usually had a dedicated analytics team and a dedicated data team. Now we buy data as a service, so we got rid of our data team and we don't have analysts per se. Instead, we have smart users. So I think Microsoft BI needs to move on to the next iteration of truly user-friendly solutions.

I've been using Microsoft BI for about three years.

Microsoft BI has never crashed on me.

I honestly can't comment on how scalable Microsoft BI is because I've never taken it beyond training or simple use. But I would imagine, if it's on Azure, that it's scalable. I haven't had the pleasure of scaling it, so I don't know, but it doesn't strike me as a solution that would have problems with scalability.

I have not had to contact technical support, but I've actually downloaded and taken three Power BI courses for free and they're very good.

I was using Tableau but the licensing cost went up when Salesforce required them to raise the price. But if the price hadn't changed, I would've absolutely stuck with Tableau because I like it. I do not know about the cost of the licenses. We buy it from the state and when it went up, our CIO at the time said no more Tableau licenses. I had to scramble to find a replacement, and fortunately, I discovered that Power BI is included in Microsoft 365. However, I prefer Tableau's interface. Microsoft BI's user interface is convoluted in terms of how you attach a data source. You have a separate screen for defining your data and then you have to jump to a different screen to model the results. In other words, there are two separate interfaces for data and analytics. In Tableau, it's more seamless. 

Setup is very easy. You click on the icon, download the MSI, and it loads itself. It takes about a couple of hours to deploy overall.

I'd rate Microsoft BI as an eight out of 10. The biggest drawback is the user interface. From what I'm seeing, Windows 11 is going to have a more user-friendly interface. Even Microsoft Edge is adopting a more user-friendly interface. I'm hoping that Power BI follows this trend as well. 

My advice for anyone who is thinking about adopting Microsoft BI is to understand what you're trying to do with it. If you're trying to do analytics with it, then it depends on the kind of analytics. If you're want to do statistical analytics, it's not the tool for you. It's a tool that's better suited for visual analytics than it is for straight-up analytics. If you're dealing with patterns and data, it's great. If you're working with numbers and data, it's not so good. You're better off with a statistical package.

We use Microsoft Power BI for both data manipulation and visualization, with a strong emphasis on data-driven storytelling. It allows you to clean and transform data. You can connect to various data sources, such as Excel, SQL databases, and SharePoint files, and clean and prepare your data using Power Query. Additionally, you can write DAX to create powerful measures for diverse use cases. Power BI enables the creation of highly insightful dashboards to convey information.

The data manipulation and data cleaning tasks are handled in the backend by Power Query in Microsoft Power BI.

Integrating data from multiple sources in Microsoft Power BI is very easy. For example, you can connect to SharePoint, various SQL servers, and other platforms. Power BI also offers a range of connectors and libraries for integrating data from various sources, including databases, online services, and cloud-based platforms. It saves a lot of time by handling large datasets. It can process millions of rows of data and allows users to create visualizations and analyze trends quickly. Power BI is effective for various types of data analysis and can adapt to complex data needs.

Additional features can enhance Power BI's capabilities in predictive analysis. Currently, Microsoft Fabric is integrated with Power BI. As Copilot and further integrations continue to develop, they will enhance Power BI's functionality.

It offers a range of formatting options for reports and dashboards. For example, if you have multiple headers and change one header's color, all the subheadings can automatically adopt the same color. This feature allows for extensive customization and formatting, which is important because leaders often prefer color-coded information presented in a specific manner.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for seven years.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

More than 400 people utilize it. It is suitable for small and medium businesses.

You can create dashboards using Power BI Desktop and share the Power BI Desktop file itself. However, for larger organizations, Power BI offers a web-based solution through Power BI Service, where you can publish reports and dashboards.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

Microsoft offers excellent products, and its community provides many options and support. If users encounter specific issues, they can find solutions in various Microsoft communities.

I have experience with both Microsoft Power BI and Tableau. Working with Tableau posed multiple challenges, such as data integration and ETL, which can be quite complex. Additionally, Tableau's measures and visualizations can be somewhat intricate. However, the flexibility in Power BI is comparable to that of Tableau.

I used Tableau for about five years before switching to Power BI, so I have a total of around eleven years of experience with these tools. As an advanced Tableau user, Power BI is simpler in comparison. Additionally, Tableau requires a paid license, whereas Power BI does not require a purchase unless you deploy it.

The initial setup is simple. You can start in about twenty minutes. However, you'll need to thoroughly understand the application to gain deeper and more critical insights. While you can learn the basics within a few hours, mastering the more advanced features involves a steeper learning curve.

Compared to other solutions, it can be relatively expensive, while the cost can be more manageable for organizations, considering the scale and the benefits.

Power BI offers several built-in AI capabilities. For instance, it includes features for sentiment analysis, generating word clouds, pattern recognition, and trend analysis. While Power BI integrates well with various external data sources and services, including advanced AI models, many analytical functions are available directly within the Power BI suite.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We mostly use this solution for dashboards and reporting.

There are roughly 2000 people in our office. At the least, 100 people use Power BI. We have around 10 super users who use it a lot. A lot of people just use it to look at dashboards. A lot of managers look at Power BI for their dashboards.

It has centralized our organization. It has democratized dashboard and report building and provides a centralized format. Without Microsoft BI, people would otherwise develop and manage their spreadsheets in Excel, which is just a lot harder than what Power BI enables us to do.

The standard BI visualization capabilities are great. It makes all the visualizations and has a drag and drop builder. It also has a power query data modeling capability that's excellent.

We're a big organization. We're looking at standardizing. Anybody can just pick it up and use it because it's easy. We want to be able to standardize what Power BI is and I think that's a challenge that we're encountering now.

Anything they can do to improve enterprise collaboration is going to help people get set up and utilize the solution.

I have been using Microsoft BI for roughly two years.

It has crashed, but it's pretty stable. I haven't had any problems where a published dashboard was not working. Once a dashboard is published, I haven't seen any problems with it.

I think it depends a lot on the data access. As long as the data backend can get into Power BI, then everything works. If there are any data connection issues, that's when there will be problems.

I get tech support from my admin. I've never contacted support.

We have a Power BI admin administrator that helped us with the initial setup. From the user's perspective, it's pretty easy.

I think it's a good price, from what I've heard. I know it's competitive with other Power BI tools. It comes in lower. I've heard no complaints about the pricing.

Our company did evaluate Tableau and a couple of other tools. We ended up promoting Power BI for everyone because it was licensed and we were already using Office 365. It integrates well with all of our existing environments.

From a user's perspective, I'd advise people to really try to understand the data sources and have a good data environment in place, beforehand. That makes the Power BI environment much better.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine. I think it's the best BI tool that I've used. I know it has a really good rating. It accomplishes a lot for us in terms of data manipulation and BI in the reporting.

I've been using it for financial data.

Flexibility and usefulness of the data.

Trend data and dashboards need improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for some time. 

The stability is a seven out of ten. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Across retail, logistics, legal, finance, and more, I use Power BI to craft custom solutions. From analyzing sales to optimizing operations, Power BI helps me extract actionable insights for informed decision-making across diverse industries.

I'm working with a law firm that has hundreds of professionals working across various areas for different clients. They struggle to accurately track hours worked per client and compare profitability. With Power BI, I can integrate data from their ERP systems and create insightful reports. These reports not only show the hours worked per client but also compare profitability between clients and highlight KPIs. By providing clear and actionable insights, Power BI helps the firm make informed decisions quickly, leading to improved profitability and efficiency.

The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs. By offering a range of visualization options and customization capabilities, Power BI enables users to quickly analyze data and gain actionable insights. Depending on the preferences and requirements of the customer, different visualization styles can be utilized, from simple and standardized views to more colorful and dynamic charts and graphs.

Areas of Power BI that could be improved are the learning curve for developers who come from non-technical backgrounds. While Power BI is a powerful tool, mastering its development aspects, including coding and formulas, can be challenging for those without a technical background. Additionally, some users find the default visualizations in Power BI Desktop to be outdated and prefer more modern and customizable options. 

One additional feature I would like to see in Power BI is tighter integration with Power Apps. This would allow for easier development without extensive coding, making it more accessible for users who aren't familiar with technical aspects like JSON files or Visual Studio Code. Simplifying the development process would streamline workflow and enhance overall usability.

I have been working with Microsoft Power BI since 2016.

I would rate the stability of Power BI at around nine out of ten. It has been consistently reliable over the past year, and any bugs are quickly addressed by a supportive community.

Power BI is scalable, but its scalability depends on factors like the amount of data, infrastructure, and database type. For large BI data, other tools might be more suitable. However, Power BI offers great flexibility, and its scalability varies based on specific needs and circumstances.

The technical support for Power BI is generally good, but it can be limited in handling diverse customer needs. While Microsoft technicians are highly knowledgeable, they may provide standard solutions based on their expertise, which might not cover all possible scenarios. Finding solutions often requires additional research, practice, and exploration of community resources. Overall, I would rate the support at a nine out of ten.

Positive

Deploying Power BI isn't difficult, but it requires time and experience. With regular updates and new features from Microsoft, staying current and understanding changes can be a continuous learning process. While it is manageable with experience, teaching someone from scratch would require significant time and effort.

The price of Power BI is very good. It is reasonable.

Power BI has revolutionized our reporting and decision-making processes. Instead of spending hours manually working with static data in Excel, we now have dynamic information at our fingertips. With Power BI, we can quickly make queries, access answers, and generate reports in minutes. By efficiently extracting data from databases and creating visually appealing visuals, such as KPI dashboards, Power BI enables us to identify trends, compare data, and make informed decisions promptly. It streamlines the entire process, from data extraction to visualization, saving us time and providing valuable insights for effective decision-making.

My advice for someone looking to use Power BI would be to start with the Pro license, as it is usually sufficient for most users. If you are dealing with a large number of customers, consider consulting with a Microsoft partner to find the best licensing solution. Based on my experience, I would recommend Power BI to others. Overall, I would rate the product as a nine out of ten.

We use Microsoft BI all over our enterprise but our main use is for the organizational dashboard. My organization sends all of our systems and ERP data into a Power BI dashboard, which goes to all the managers, the leadership, and then gets reported up to the company executives.

Microsoft BI has helped out the organization because it has brought visibility of our data across the organization allowing everyone to see the same metrics.

My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations.

Microsoft BI could improve by having better collaboration between developers working on the same dashboard. The developer platform is all done on a single laptop and it's difficult to have the same project files work. Two developers have to go back and forth. You have to have the project file on one developer's laptop making it difficult to co-develop.

In terms of the performance, it could always improve sometimes. It's only slow to update. The automated data feeds have to be all updated.

I have been using Microsoft BI for two years.

The stability of Microsoft BI is very good. We have not had an issue.

Microsoft BI has scaled very well for us. We have a very large organization with users all across the company.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution. It's a standard program for analysts and even managers will use it. It is a standard business analyst software. 

The solution is extensively being used in our organization.

I have not contacted Mircosoft for technical support. I only use our internal support.

We previously used SAS and it is similar to Microsoft BI. It's a little different in the visualization. It was more on analytics, but it also had the visualization.

We had SAS Enterprise Guide which was on-premise. When they were looking at cloud solutions, they kind of opened it up for more possibilities. The deciding factors of why we switched to Microsoft BI was we already had many Microsoft products and we have a SQL Server Data Warehouse. There's good integration between our existing Microsoft systems with Microsoft BI.

I was part of the initial user testing of Microsoft BI, but it was mostly IT that handled all the initial implementation.

We have a dedicated IT team of two administrators that support Microsoft BI. One of the administrator's full-time job is to manage the Microsoft BI.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is to do some training. There is enough training curriculum available to get people going.

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

I'm a project manager and we are customers of Microsoft.

I like the toggling feature, the ability to switch from one page to another. 

I have a couple of dashboards that are weekly and monthly. I was able to download the dashboard, but I cannot paste any images into PowerPoint. There are also visuals based on the brand that should automatically pop up in the graph and which should be a toggling option. And I'm having performance issues if I want to add two or three tables at a time, which I could easily do in Tableau. Copy-pasting data to PowerPoint for presentation to the executive level should be easy but we're only able to copy the visual, not the underlying data. 

I've been using this solution for the past eight months. 

The solution is scalable but we haven't yet migrated everyone to Power BI. Our users are not finding Power BI as good as Pique, which perhaps they're just more used to. They're trying but some of the features available in Pique are not there so they are not comprehensively using it. It's being used mainly for internal analysis for now. 

We initially used Tableau because our data was an internal data source, and now all of our data is migrated to tool environments, that the Power BI is more comfortable with. BI is also a free product which is another reason the company recommends it.

The initial setup was straightforward, we have a Power BI admin team who take care of all that. 

Because of performance issues and because we're unable to do all the aggregation, I rate this solution six out of 10.