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About Microsoft Power BI
A suite of business intelligence and analytics with reporting, data preparation, visualization, and analytics tools.
The biggest positive that Power BI has going for it is that it was included as part of my organization's O365 subscription.
The UI is clunky, the data model is not very intuitive to set up, performance is slow, especially compared to other tools. No build in box and whisker plots was a huge downside too.
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Filter reviews (1,570)
The ultimate best tool for accurate business analytics.
Comments: Microsoft Power BI helps us to run our business efficiently by giving us insights which allows us to understand which areas that are performing well as well as areas which need much of our attention. Moreso, it helps us understand our performance in the market and thereby develop strategies to help us remain competitive in the gaming market.
Pros:
With Microsoft Power BI, we are able to run full analysis on our entire business and this keeps us on the light about how every part and department of the company is performing. The reports we get are easy to read and understand and with the visualization options available like graphs, we get to capture insights easily from them. It has well defined and dynamic security functions which guarantee the security of all our business data by making sure thag we are the only ones with the access to these confidential information.
Cons:
Am yet to experience the downside of Microsoft Power BI and there has been nothing that has ever gone wrong with it.
Alternatives Considered:
I do not know of another tool that does this job so well
Comments: I use it daily for my for tracking everything that can be measured in a delivery process, weekly for planning and monthly for business reporting. It is my everything data tool. I have been involved in exploring other options but it feels like Power BI stands alone in this field.
Pros:
For a tool to be this powerful and complete at this price level really does make it almost impossible to beat. If you have any experience with the Microsoft Power Query platform such as in Excel then Power BI is a natural next step for upping your BI and reporting game. The integration with the Microsoft Office system is seamless and it makes querying external data sources a doddle.
Cons:
It can feel a bit clunky and slow if you do not have a high powered client - but the deployed dashboards take this issue away from everything except development. The only other issue I have encountered is in deploying this to a non-Microsoft environment but the tools are available to make it work, it just adds an overhead that you need to be aware of when evaluating the tool. Even with this overhead we have found Power BI to still be preferable to other options native to our non-Microsoft infrastructure and that is really impressive!
power BI saved lot of time in building reports
Comments: Report generated out of MS business intelligence tool is interactive and eye catching unlike the other toolsone of coolest BI tool to start career in. we use it as key tool in our company to showcase eye catching story board of insight to our stakeholders and clientsTool solves many mathematical calculations of averages and net sales in reports moreover we save lot of time
Pros:
I integrate with many number of tools like importing data sources from sql, excel features like bar graphs flowcharts, unleashes mind boggling charts and helps analytical representation beginner friendly to use to tell powerful stories with data visualizationI run business of non tech workforce. we use BI as key primary tool all day to create insightful and stunning dashboardsOverall basic tool to suggest to anyone interested in field of data science
Cons:
real time data visualization sometimes feel its best implementation. sometimes it fail to show by missing out dataregularly we use the product. I also depend many other software out in market has similar capabilities and less complexcustomer support there is available within the tool
Alternatives Considered:
Intuitive and very customizable. An all-round fantastic visualisation solution
Comments: Excel and Power BI have been in my software toolkit almost since day one. I think the best thing about it is that it opens the door for in-depth data analysis without using code or SQL, which means that SMBs like ours can drive insights from data as well. Other than that, there are a lot of chart types available, and you can easily add custom elements. All in all, would definitely recommend.
Pros:
I think it's great that the interface takes most of its elements from Excel. As a person who has used Excel for pretty much the whole of the last two decades, it was much much easier to pick Power BI up for me in the beginning because I was used to most of the visual elements anyway.
Cons:
Not a huge issue but it would make my work so much easier to have the live support option as they offer in some of the other BI tools.
Transforming unprocessed data into insightful visuals using power BI
Comments: It has been a very smooth transition from old reporting solutions which were limited to tabular representation to Power BI with it's wide range of visuals which can be transformed and adapted as per the end user need
Pros:
Easy learning curve, user friendly interface, cross platform integration and compatibility, ability to setup custom logics.
Cons:
DAX has a steep learning curve and power can be optimised to handle large volumes of data .
Insights you can trust.
Comments: Microsoft Power BI always shows prowess in business data analytics and this has enabled us to achieve a better understanding of our business operations. With the insights we get from Microsoft Power BI, we are able to make informed decisions, plan and do forecasts to prepare ourselves for situations deemed to happen before they do.
Pros:
In data analytics, the insights are only important if one can understand them and for that i like how Microsoft Power BI offers easy to understand data visualization tools which makes it easy to read and understand the insights about the business. It allows easy creation of reports which we use to demonstrate how our business is performing as well as understanding areas in our business which needs improvement. The data analysis tools uses AI and drag and drop technology which makes it easy for anyone to use it for the analysis.
Cons:
Nothing at all from me. Using Microsoft Power BI has been so simple and it has very responsive features.
You can't control what you don't know, analyze and get to know your business with Microsoft Power BI.
Comments: As the saying goes by you can't control what you don't know, we are using Microsoft Power BI so as we can have an understanding of how business which would then allows us to be in control of what is happening. It allows to have access to valuable insights which helps us in making decisions to allow our business to become more agile and more productive.
Pros:
The highlight of Microsoft Power BI in analyzing our business has being how simple it makes it for us to analyze our business data from across multiple platforms which we use, discover the insights and visualize them in easier to read and understand forms like graphs. You don't need to be a coding guru to learn how to use it since everything is pretty straightforward and has no complexities of lines codes.
Cons:
Microsoft Power BI capabilities in data analytics has always been so evident to us and it has never given any reasons to doubt it.
Accurate business insights with Microsoft Power BI.
Comments: Microsoft Power BI allows us to have a clear picture on how our our organization is performing on all aspects. It offers us with comprehensive analytics tools which makes it possible to fully analyze our organization and get insights that helps us make decisions and take actions to help us improve in all areas.
Pros:
Microsoft Power BI gives us the power to turn every stone when analyzing our business and this helps us access accurate and dynamic insights about our business as a whole. The dashboards and the reporting tools offers the most simple experience and makes it easy to read, interpret and understand each and every data that you have generated.
Cons:
Microsoft Power BI implementation was not so smooth but we were lucky to that the support team was there to answer our questions.
Advantages of Microsoft PowerBi
Comments: My experience using the tool has been quite good. It makes it much easier for me to present the situation of my work team in meetings, to provide greater visibility of the status of the objectives that are being worked on as well as what we still need.
Pros:
The tools it has since it facilitates the creation, design and management of reports. Helps to have visibility of work activities and metrics. Helps carry out analysis and develop improvement plans based on the same.
Cons:
I don't think I've found anything I dislike so far.
Microsoft Power BI - the intelligence tool
Comments: Excellent !!!
Pros:
The ease of using it. Making the complex reports more meaningful, readable, comprehensible. The free version, which allows the user to have enough room & make a decision for a subscription per the need & capacity. which is definitely a gift for students, non-earning or on a break from job person.
Cons:
For people new to Business intelligence its take quite some effort to master Power BI.
Very robust, though a little overwhelming
Comments: We're moving from having staff creating Excel reports or Access database reports to having Power BI do it all for us. We spend some time cleaning up the user's data, streamlining how they enter it (and where - we still use Access, some SQL, some Sharepoint), and Power BI does the rest after that. Our staff loves that they no longer have to manually create reports, and they love the way Power BI looks for them. We are enjoying it overall.
Pros:
The dashboard creation is amazing. Give it a data source, design how you want to see your data, and it shows it to you. I enjoy creating dashboards for our different departments. And once our staff sees the reports and dashboards they get from this, vs how they used to get it in an Excel spreadsheet or an Access Report, they are hooked.
Cons:
Overwhelming in the back end. Sometimes you just cannot get the data to display the way you want. There are so many options, features, methods. It gets overwhelming. My biggest gripe is that the back end is not as user friendly as other programs. And, comparing it to something that one of my users would create in Excel, it's difficult for me to get the exact data reported that they want. I have to figure out how to display it, and because the Power Bi is just so robust, it's a little overwhelming in that respect.
Alternatives Considered:
Moderate cost for a moderate experience for medium sized enterprises
Comments: So so. The dashboards and reports are limited in visual design, so they all look the same and quite ugly. Because of the difficulty sharing reports/dashboards to external individuals and the lack of a Google sheets connector I couldn't use PowerBI for most of the solutions we need, but will use it for some since it integrates well with the rest of the MS office ecosystem.
Pros:
The thing that most sets PowerBI apart from comparable business intelligence solutions is the lower cost of multi-user deployment within an organization. PowerBI is part of a Microsoft Office 365 subscription package for businesses and you only need to pay an additional 15USD/month for each additional admin/analyst account you add. This is a stark contrast to similar solutions like Tableau, which charge a monthly fee for each user and has a minimum user count that equates to roughly a 15,000USD/year license cost as minimum. If your organisation is already invested in the Microsoft Office ecosystem this could be the ideal solution for you if you need to keep costs down.
Cons:
It can't connect to google sheets and every other business intelligence platform can. This can be really limiting if your business uses a variety of SaaS solutions since many offer the simplest data integration options via Google sheets. PowerBI also has real issues with external sharing of dashboards/reports. You only have the option of publishing internally (visible to your organization's users) or publishing publically (indexed in search engines). There is no option of sharing dashboards and reports to individuals outside your organization via a login, like what is done with Google Data Studio. PowerBI also has a steep learning curve and uses 3 coding languages (DAX, M, and SQL). It's more complicated than it needs to be but it's relational database modeling has proven a good one and competitors have copied PowerBI's approach in recent years (Tableau).
Alternatives Considered:
Simple and highly customizable
Comments:
1. Dax query is highly reliable when comes to slice and dice the granular level data based on time trend.
2. Embedded report and dashboard in any kind of business applications easily and it becomes part of it.
Pros:
1. Free desktop tool for development(Power BI Desktop) and simple installation process. 2. Almost, we can connect many source to fetch the data. Ex csv,web,excel,sql,odbc etc.., 3. Specialized ETL(Extract,transform,load) to clean the raw unstructured data into structured data with help of Power Query. 4. Powerful DAX query to customized measure and calculated column to get desirable business metrics and KPIs. 5. Top standard visuals, Custom visuals(visual market) and also we can create our own visuals using reactjs. 6. Publish in cloud(azure) to view report anywhere in the world with help Power BI service. 7. High availability and low latency to view report and dashboard with help of xVelocity engine. 8. Anyone can easily create basic charts with structured data.
Cons:
1. Power BI Desktop consumes a huge amount of resource in system. 2. Service monitoring increases for larger report consumers. 3. While dealing with an enormous volume of data, constant optimization takes place.
Power BI, widely used Tool
Comments: Concluding or summing it all up, I think this is by far the most convenient tool out there for performing various things such as extract data from different sources, clean, visualize, create colorful dashboards and reports. All in all, a great way to present what we have to say in words. With the use of Artificial Intelligence too, its clever enough to handle certain tasks really well.
Pros:
Most of what I like about this is the outcomes of it, it is simply brilliant as to how we get such clarity on insights with this tool. This can make businesses take the correct decisions that drives them into good decision making that profits them. A one stop BI solution tool.
Cons:
While creating complex relationships among data, it can be a little tedious to do it because if there are multiple links amongst the tables/data, POWER BI cannot handle them quite well at times. The factor of modeling the data in the right way comes in picture.
Alternatives Considered:
Best Business Intelligence Tool Ever!
Comments: Great experience and great tool to experience has a very easy interface and can make dashboards easily.
Pros:
Microsoft PowerBI is the most easy tool to use, an non IT personnel and not a well trained personnel can easily use this tool. This tool has an interactive Graphical user interface and if you have any problem you can just google it.
Cons:
The frequent update sometimes will be much tricky to handle as if you have the newest version of the desktop and the old version of desktop so it may be tricky and the file may not upload to the server.
There are plenty of competitors, but Power BI is tops
Comments: Power BI allows me to manipulate data and present it in visually appealing and flexible formats.
Pros:
I have used Tableau and Google Data Studio - among other alternatives. Nothing has seemed to compare to the functionality that Power BI offers. Everything about the program is made with the full spectrum of analysis in mind - from the designer to the data 'wrangler' to the end consumer (ie. others within the enterprise). In this way, Power BI is extremely powerful because it can be used for so many different types of projects; the data-analysis intensive to the more visual 'data-presentation' dashboards.
Cons:
Sharing dashboards and reports in Power BI is easy and it has a lot of options for doing so. However, the requirement that all users must have a Pro Account to view dashboards created in Pro is a bit of a hindrance in a global organization where it does not make economical sense for every employee to have a Pro account. It seems like it would be a great addition to allow limited sharing to everyone - even those without a Pro account, as most of my internal team does not have an account.
Alternatives Considered:
Best Self Service BI Solution to start with
Comments: Dashboard, Reports, Data extraction/Transformations from websites, PDF's and other sources, transformations and also as an alternative to vba)
Pros:
Capability to Extract, Transform data at the desktop level in a single package. (Others solutions like have Data transformation feature inbuilt)
Cons:
On publishing your report online, it gets slightly cumbersome to configure through (like configuring gateways for auto-refresh)
Build business reports using Microsoft Power BI
Comments: Build business insight dashboard and reports using power BI.
Pros:
The power BI integrates well with other data sources to build business reports. The flexibility of writing custom sql is great . The user management and security reporting brilliantly works.
Cons:
The reporting could slow down when handling large volume of data . The data distribution technique should be optimized to handle this situation.
Power BI is one of the most user friendly BI software for adding visual representation and analytics to your existing reports
Comments: Overall good software for beginners and can be explored to get the best efficiency from the software
Pros:
below are a few pros • Sharing dashboard in a group a. Sharing can be done once you have the Pro version of Power BI. Dashboard can be shared with the respective department members or your own team members. b. Since you have prepared the dashboard you will be the owner and you can decide whether you want to give the other members only viewing rights or editing rights as well. c. With this feature reports will always be on the cloud server and can be viewed as and when required d. Reports can be downloaded as and when required. • Viewing dashboard in Mobile/ tab and preparing phone layout a. Once a dashboard has been prepared and saved, the same can be accessed on Power BI App with the same login. b. Since the screen is small compared to laptop, all the dashboard elements can be redesigned to suit the phone screen. c. The other features remain the same and the dashboard is interactive on the phone as well however it cannot be edited on phone. • Export dashboard to PowerPoint, PDF a. This is one of the most important features of Power BI. Reports or dashboards prepared can be exported on PowerPoint or PDF with a click of a button. b. Hence Management reports and department reports can be automated on Power BI and once you refresh the data, the report will be ready to share. c. One problem is that few images which are not compatible with PowerPoint don’t show post downloading. • Narratives for dashboard a. This is one of the recent features offered by Power BI. With the help of narratives you can get the insight of the dashboard in a story form. b. Narrative uses its intelligence to study the data and give output in pointers, paragraphs etc which can be customised. • Importing visuals to suit your need a. Apart from the general visualizations available in Power BI, there are additional visualizations released by Power BI from time to time. These visualizations enhance the visual appearance as well as the adds to further analytics in different ways. b. Visualizations which have downloaded and used in the dashboard are Infographic designer, Narratives for Business Intelligence, KPI Column chart, and Timeline. • Edit interactions in dashboard a. It is important to understand the interactions and groupings in power BI since with the help of these you can control which graphs you want to automatically change by clicking on the other. b. With the help of grouping you can define groups and sub group which can be viewed together as a group if required. • KPI Column Chart a. This is a recent custom visual developed by Power BI. With the help of this visual you can put the KPI target against the actual on a monthly basis. b. Forecasted revenue/ cost can also be put in this visual which will be shown in different colour. c. Individual monthly targets can also be put which can be interchanged by putting variance. d. Data can also been viewed in a table form along with graphical.
Cons:
• One of the important features of exporting report in PowerPoint does not allow custom visual to be exported. Hence if there are custom visuals in your report then the same will show error once exported. • Arranging dashboard is a bit tedious and takes a lot of time • To share reports, we need to publish to MS Cloud. We cannot share report from Power BI Desktop • For sharing a report even members to who report needs to be shared have to get Power BI Pro. Since the department to whom report is shared is just to view giving them a Pro license might not be useful.
Enterprise Analytics - with some gotchas
Comments: We're using this as our enterprise analytics platform to supplement paginated reports in SSRS/PBIRS. Aside from the wrinkles mentioned, it's been a solid performer. If there was a little more "admin" capabilities around subscriptions and permissions, it'd be a home run.
Pros:
Near-constant updates and feature additions. It's exceptionally easy to throw together a Power BI Report across a bunch of different data sources and then share it with 1 or 100 people. Tons of connectivity support - if you have data somewhere it can *probably* read it into a model for consumption. The "front end" development is pretty straightforward with the ability to get very fancy with custom visuals - although you need to be a real developer to build those yourself.
Cons:
It feels like there are some (currently) missing enterprise features. We still haven't really figured out a holistic way of managing both the enterprise stuff, as well as the "power user" self service stuff that gets published around the org. To Microsoft's credit, there are pretty much monthly releases that add ne functionality and features. Some things I'd like to see include more API support and additional sources like Box, perhaps.
Microsoft Power BI
Comments: Overall, Power BI is an excellent tool for data analysis and visualization, and its ease of use and integration with other tools makes more meaningful insights and informed decisions.
Pros:
Microsoft Power BI is a powerful cloud-based business intelligence tool that helps us to visualize data from multiple sources. And it is a user-friendly tool that offers drag-and-drop features and self-service capabilities. The most appealing aspect is it provides a wide range of visualizations, including charts, graphs, and maps that helps the users to understand and explore the data easily. In addition, we can also use DAX and Power Query in Power BI to perform complex calculations and analysis of the data to create insightful reports. Along with that integration is fantastic in Power BI with Microsoft products including Excel, Sharepoint, and Teams, as well as other third-party applications. And the best part is it allows users to share the created reports and dashboards with others, either within an organization or with external stakeholders. The most useful feature of Power BI is we can deploy it on both on-cloud and on-premise platforms.
Cons:
Power Bi has a limit of importing data at a time which is approximately 2 GB of data. To import greater volumes of data we need to extend our free version to a paid version of Power BI. This might be a limitation for users who can't afford to invest in a paid subscription.
Microsoft Power BI has changed the way we report - and it's been great!
Comments: We have begun to use this for all business reporting - from the Executive team all the way to the daily front-line workers. It has replaced outdated Excel files and labor intensive reporting methods of the past. It has become invaluable as a daily tool for the entire team and saves an extensive amount of hours from redundant report generation.
Pros:
It is so easy to use once you understand the premise of it. We have super users that create functional dashboards so that anyone can go in and get real-time updates without having to rewrite queries. We use this for our daily sales reporting and it lets you drill down and really understand the numbers.
Cons:
It was a little intimidating to use at the start as there is so much functionality. Once you get the hang of it, it makes perfect sense. Just take your time to learn and focus on one aspect at a time and it will all make perfect sense.
Miscrosoft Power BI for Federal Acquisition Spend Analysis
Comments: All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights.
Pros:
Power BI simplifies the process of combining different types of data sources to create a single data model. There are also many built-in Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) functions that help reduce the time required to prepare data. Creating reports and dashboards is as easy as drag and drop. The Power BI User Groups are strong and plentiful, so you can always read through blogs to get answers to questions that you may have. The Power BI Desktop application is used to perform ETL, create reports and is free. The reports are published to the Power BI cloud service for sharing, which is also free with limited capabilities. For more capabilities, such as security groups and scheduled data refreshing, there is a subscription fee. Microsoft will be releasing an on-premise solution for sharing Power BI content via an update to SQL Server 2016 hopefully within the next few months.
Cons:
It's not always easy to speak directly with a MS Power BI expert, so that is a bummer. Also, you have to sign up to the Power BI service using an email address in order 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 which is a real bummer.
Power BI review
Comments: I have been using Power Bi for over 2 years now in creating Dashboard for several items including Finance, data, Students and school data and recently I have used it in documenting poll results and Covid-19 cases.
Pros:
Power BI is great especially with data analytics and visualization. This is usually very informative especially to the senior management when creating dashboard and data summaries. For example, Its specifically important in monitoring budget and expenditure data. The most important advantage of Power Bi is how it can easily summarize, transform and visualize data through summaries and dash board reports. In addition Power BI delivers real-time reports especially when linked with production of the data. It both accessible on computer and mobile. It is also very easy to integrate with excel and other data storing softwares.
Cons:
It is somehow technical especially when writing DAX scripts and when linking several tables for relationships. Since its mainly used for Dashboards and visualizations, the presentations can be crowded considering a lot of information is supposed to be squeezed on one page. Power BI also requires complex formulas in DAX which sometimes can give wrong results from expected. It also takes a lot of time to prepare data and create visuals.
Power Bi its changing the way we interact with data, information and decision making
Comments: Data is the new petroleum, Information is the new combustible; and Power BI will boost this challenging new world of information and analysis.
Pros:
For the last 30 years I have been using Excel to work with Tables, Filters, Functions, Formulas, Conditional formatting, Graphs, Pivot tables, Segmentation and VBA to register data and analyze information. That was great. But now, with the huge amount of data, available from many sources and Excel limitations, we needed something more robust and Microsoft launched Power BI. I have been using it for more than a year. Now I don’t use pivot tables and graphs for analysis anymore, I use Power BI visualizations to represent and summarize the data. With it’s impressive tools including geolocalization, I have found more effective ways to convert, transform, represent, analyze and make better decisions and planning with Power BI. It’s ecosystem composed of Power Bi Desktop, Power BI Services (in the cloud) and Power Bi apps, has allowed me to find very innovative and productive ways to monitor the performance of my business and improve communication with my clients
Cons:
It is in continuous development. The first week of each month, Microsoft releases a new version of Power Bi, so we have to keep us updated to use the program efficiently. But the pros outweigh the cons.
