Microsoft Power BI Reviews

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.

We primarily use the product for running the reports and all data extraction in our organization.

The solution is a wonderful tool overall. 

Power BI is very powerful and very easy to use. Its user-friendliness is one of its most valuable aspects. It has a very nice user interface that makes everything easy to navigate.

The product can go easily go and extract data and it can put it into any format.

It's a very good data analytic tool.

The initial setup is pretty easy. It's pretty straightforward in general.

I can't say that anything glaring is missing from the offering at this time.

Microsoft is doing a lot of research on it and they're coming up with a lot of good release items.

I'm not overly technical, and so I can't really speak to any shortcomings from a technical standpoint.

I'd like to have more time with the solution to evaluate it to see if there's really anything missing. We don't really go in-depth with the product.

I've been using the solution since about 2017. It's been a few years now.

The stability is very good. It's a Microsoft product and therefore they wouldn't put anything out that wasn't tested and worthy of release. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable and offers good performance. 

While the scalability is there, the cost is what you have to factor in. It has to scale as if there's more data, it needs to meet that demand and be able to extract and analyze it.  

Technical support for the most part has been very good. They are helpful and responsive. We are satisfied with the level of support we receive. On a scale of one to 25, I would give it a mark of 20.

We've found the initial setup to be pretty straightforward. It's not complex. A company shouldn't have too much trouble getting everything up and running.

I'm not sure of the exact cost of the solution. It's not an aspect of the product I need to worry about.

I am aware that we currently have an enterprise license.

I personally haven't evaluated or compared any other solutions. I don't have any knowledge in terms of how it compares to other options.

We are customers and end-users. We don't have a specific business relationship with Microsoft.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten overall. We've been pretty satisfied with the product.

We primarily use the solution for building dashboards, one-off analytics, and things of that nature that combine data.

The functions from a standpoint of generating analytics have been really helpful overall. That aspect has helped improve our organization.

In general, we are pretty pleased.

The ability to combine the data and to connect with pretty established platforms has been the solution's most valuable aspect to us. 

The fact that you can visualize items is great. The visualization power is very good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I don't know if I can pinpoint any specific items that I don't like. However, the more connectors that they provide the better. 

I don't use it day in, day out to tell you if it has any kind of functionality items that may be open up for improvement opportunities. 

The solution could probably beef up items related to statistics and things to cover the gap between the advanced things that you can do with Tableau. Any kind of advanced statistical analysis would be very helpful in future releases.  

The solution could be quicker at rendering data.

I've been using the solution for three years or so.

The solution is very stable. It's reliable. We've been happy with it. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution can scale well if you need it to. That shouldn't be a problem for any organization.

I'm not sure how many people are actually using the solution in our organization. Everybody has been kind of encouraged to leverage the platform on an ongoing basis. However, obviously, those that are holding jobs related to any kind of analytics are probably more prone to using it.

I don't tend to deal with technical support. That's probably more on the IT team than on my plate and therefore I don't really know how their tech support works. I can't speak to their knowledgeability and response times.

With our company, there were probably those that needed to do advanced analytics that were using solutions like Tableau or Excel.

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. A company shouldn't run into any problems when it comes to setting it up.

We have a pretty strong partnership with Microsoft and we tend to help them develop their product as well.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this time.

I would advise other organizations that the product has a lot to offer and therefore it's worth the investment and the effort.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Sometimes it could be quite at rendering data, however, overall, we've been happy with the results.

I lead the data visualization competency. As a competency leader, my responsibility is to make people grow in this technology. It could be Power BI, Tableau, or QlikView. We are service-oriented, and depending upon the demand, we have to have experienced people and a resource pool ready in these areas. Depending upon the requirement, I decide how many people need to be trained or hired.

Most of the clients I am interacting with are looking towards Power BI because of the cost and simplicities. It provides an entire feature set and a complete solution. It has tight integration with Office 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Technology Stack, and datatypes like R and Python. 

It should be more scalable for an enterprise-level implementation. When you deploy large data sets, the response has to be faster in Power BI. This is one thing that needs to be improved in it.

I have been using this solution for close to two years.

We found no issues. It is an aggregated reporting tool. It cannot handle a detailed level of data. It is meant only for the dashboarding purpose. You need to have your underlying data in an aggregated way, and then it would be faster. It depends on whether you have a live connection or you don't have a live connection.

We don't see many issues, but whenever we put a request, they at least respond.

I have worked on Tableau. Before Tableau, I have worked with traditional tools, such as SAP BusinessObjects. My team has got experience with Spotfire, but we are not seeing a great demand for Spotfire.

If you ask me for the top three, I would qualify Power BI, then Tableau, and then QlikView. That's the demand that I'm seeing in the market from various customers.

I am satisfied with its price. Its price is very less as compared to Tableau and QlikView.

My first advice is to learn SQL. The foundational knowledge and SQL skills are the most important. You have to be very strong in writing SQL code. You have to improve your mind so that you know what you are writing in Power BI. After that, it is very easy to pick up any front-end reporting tool, such as Power BI or Tableau. After you have good expertise in Power BI, you can slowly learn Python so that you can do good integration. All these efforts would be great for your career.

Being a gold partner of Microsoft for the past few years, we work directly with Microsoft product teams. Sometimes as part of a pre-launch, they also connect with us. If we see a feature or functionality that a client requires, we at least put it across to them. How they prioritize it within their product team is up to them. They prioritize depending on the need of the market and demand from various clients, and they release features accordingly. Sometimes, we also work on a pre-release.

They release new features and functionalities every month. They have also recently released data protection smart narratives. If you look at the Gartner report, they are leading. I see a lot of demand for this solution.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

I have taught and mastered many desktop tools, including Power BI, for the purpose of prototyping designs for business intelligence and data warehousing. Currently, I am teaching data analytics at graduate level and Power BI is on my schedule.

We teach tools like Power BI by going through common scenarios in a business intelligence environment, which most often deal with the factual numerics that get designed into a sales force reporting dashboard or similar solution, showing details like order placement, orders shipped and paid for, etc. The templates for these typically use a style of diagramming called star schema, which is a common dimension modeling technique. 

I can't say whether it's the most frequent real-world use case that a real customer would focus on, but for the level of our tutorials, a sales scenario might involve a description of customers, products, locations, maybe geography, and the timing of sales for trends analysis.

Other than Power BI, I also teach AWS and Azure, where I help guide students to plan and come up with architecture for deploying to the cloud. It's not actually very hands-on, as it's more to help with architecture diagramming for the intentions that students have when using them. And at our institution, all of our courses last only four weeks, so it's very fast tracked, which sometimes means that we don't really go too in-depth.

AWS has a lot of samples and diagrams, including many graphics that are fairly artistically detailed. The level at which I've helped students reference those kinds of diagrams is mainly for their team projects, to illustrate their intention, for example, to deploy a database into AWS. If it's an SQL Server database, we usually choose Azure. But it's not to actually do it. It's rather to have the intention to, for illustration purposes.

I had a brilliant student in May last year, 2019, who did her graduate capstone project - where I was her advisor - using Power BI. And she has two times now responded to my invitation to be a guest speaker on that tool to classes such as the data analytics class that I've been teaching for about 20 times now, going back six years.

At my institution, I'm the only one teaching database design, whether undergrad or grad, and I found Power BI was a very attractive tool to introduce during the database design class, and then later enable the students to use it for their capstone. Unfortunately, it didn't work out in November this year, because few of the students picked up on it and gave the actual time it would take to focus their attention on using Power BI templates.

Overall, my observation is that the enrollment is way down and the students who are still in the program are very distracted, I think because of the pandemic. Despite this, Power BI has helped me introduce students to business intelligence and data analytics because it's a very attractive and cost-effective tool (there's no cost to it, it's free).

Another reason I'm inspired to focus my time on helping students with Power BI is because of the analyses done by the Gartner Group and Forrester Research, wherein they reviewed the strengths of Power BI. Both of them call it a "killer app". That caught my attention. And Power BI seems like the best thing to suggest to the students.

And I'm up to it on my side teaching through online, although I'm regretting that I cannot go on a campus to be still there for the students whose strong preference is to be together in a room learning on site. I hope that in the class in May, there'll be more people really interested in actually using it. In November, I was hoping some of the students would, but for reasons such as the pandemic, these online students have too many distractions. Especially if they're also still working or they have families with kids at home.

What Power BI is, is a whole collection of templates of small amounts of data that can be used to do something for a real world project, that can be easily set up and become the business intelligence environment or a data warehouse for a large amount of data, for a real world customer. That's what is remarkable. And that's what it takes.

It makes use of the ordinary things, and they'll sound familiar. Excel, Access, or SQL Server as the database, and the deployment techniques like Azure for it to be in the cloud.

It's very heavily like Microsoft promoting its own products, but I forgive it because this time it works. And I'm speaking from some experience; I worked in the data warehouse technology group at Oracle for three and a half years, and I was helping Oracle's clients put up a data warehouse with Oracle as the database, and to migrate data into the Oracle database. So that was my background. And for me to be persuaded that this collection of regular, already known, already used desktop tools could work just as well, but with the added value of the samples, the templates, frequent updates, and lots of support. That says a lot.

It also has other features that I like, especially regarding the designs in the set of templates for things that would perhaps be very puzzling to somebody doing it for themselves. It has pre-built tables to hold, during project lifestyle, maybe a small select amount of test data with the intention of the large amount of data going into production after deployment. And it has all the table designs that start out generic but that can be easily customized.

When it comes to improvement, I would say there could be more tutorials for students in universities who are just learning it. And it wouldn't have to be just for students in universities. It might also be for the people who use it in the real world.

The evidence that I see when I look into it is there's a lot of user group type of connections to the Power BI world. And many, many bloggers telling their stories and promoting themselves or small businesses promoting themselves to do it for you using Power BI. The claim being that they could help you get it done instead of you doing it yourself. That's what goes on in this industry. You see a lot of entrepreneurial people who want to work in the role of consultant and get paid for it. There's a lot of that.

And the invitation to look into the websites comes from little mini tutorials, which can be very helpful. But the next step of those tutorials, if most of the people get what they want out of them, is a contract to do the work. I don't want to introduce those kinds of things to my students, because it's kind of promoting something that could be a distraction.

I worked for years as an independent consultant. I even did a fairly long series of contracts up in the state of Washington at Microsoft and I had 38 years in the industry before I became an academic teacher. But I'm avant-garde when it comes to sales. I avoid salesman because I don't want to believe the hype. I don't want to be deceived. And I don't want to suggest that somebody go that way. The topic of sales is overdone. This is an opinion on my part.

On a practical note, the process of importing data into a new environment that has recently been designed is always a major effort. And Power BI has some weaknesses when it comes to loading data into an otherwise good concept and a good design because if it's not seriously tested and all shortcomings noticed beforehand, the importing process will fail.

Even a cool tool like Power BI cannot anticipate the complexity of the variety of sources of data. But they're not alone. That would not be a disqualifier. But because I don't have direct yet, hands-on, having done this, I don't really know how Microsoft would improve this area.

I think they've got it handled on integration. Everything that you're working with is already a Microsoft environment or a Microsoft tool. It's integrated. But if you're using the desktop tools by Microsoft and you need to deploy into a backend of Oracle, there might be some things that a smart consultant has to help out with. So cross-platform integration could use some improvement in terms of ease-of-use.

I have used Microsoft BI in my data analytics classes for a few years now. 

In an abstract sense, it's holding up. I don't speak to actual customers of Microsoft products to answer that question. But I would suggest that it's holding up because the Gartner Group put out another magic quadrant output that describes it as being in the leader category.

It's a well-respected research group, Gartner. In fact, companies that want to acquire its research for anything more specific or consulting, have to pay for it and have ownership. I don't pay for it. But there are many vendors who have my school email on their lists, so I get the reports for free, and I have my hands on quite a collection of the reports.

And that's why I'm mentioning them because the Gartner Group has mentioned Power BI twice now. So as far as long-term prospects go, I'd say Power BI is a stable solution.

Microsoft provides frequent updates and a lot of support for Power BI.

I have worked in the data warehouse technology group at Oracle for three and a half years, helping Oracle's clients deploy a data warehouse with Oracle as the database. But when Power BI came onto the scene, I was more and more persuaded to use it instead for business intelligence and data warehouse purposes. This was mainly because I enjoyed how easily Power BI builds on existing tools that I'm already familiar with like Excel and Access. 

The setup is straightforward, because it exhibits itself within familiar tools, like spreadsheets.

The complexity comes when you try to convert from simple beginnings into something that needs to eventually become reality. But I'm guessing. I don't know that it's complex. And anyway, I personally like complex. It attracts my attention.

For my primary use case, i.e. teaching students, the free version of Power BI is adequate.

May is the next time I'll be teaching the data analytics class, the graduate class, and I will be actively trying to promote Power BI for the team project.

I would rate Microsoft Power BI an eight out of ten. 

Usually, when dealing with business intelligence projects with big data, all customers have Office 365 but within these licenses, Microsoft BI is often included.

The use case depends on the project. For example, in the logistics project, we need maybe four persons. For retail sales without stocks, it's a very easy project for us, but only for sales, and purchase orders, it's a standard part of the tool, to incorporate warehousing. Sometimes it's more difficult to clean the data if you have something like visualizations. It is often more difficult to understand what kind of data you need for the customer, or the strategy of the company who needs the information, to build a suitable solution. Customers often change their requirements. That's why Microsoft BI is more useful than traditional user tools, as it is flexible to changing requirements.

It's a great tool for visualization data, and it's free for engineers. Microsoft BI has a good online community. You don't need to be an engineer to use it. In Microsoft BI you can embed the visualisation and reports into your applications. Embedded items are much faster and cheaper to use. It's very easy to work with the customers using this kind of tool, rather than say, Oracle. I have used the personal edition, but some customers have been trained to use the professional version. Initially, I spent a lot of time learning the new system. As I was already experienced in other, similar technologies it was not difficult to understand the visualizations. I encouraged our clients to do more with Microsoft BI.

It should work faster and have more common languages so that you can use it more in different types of connections. It doesn't work well on big data. It is too slow. I hope in future it will be a comparable big data tool, such as, for example, Data Lake. It uses the DAX language, which is not used widely. Maybe they should develop this part of the tool to improve access to people who don't know DAX. Sometimes it needs to have a special configuration and hardware to connect to a data warehouse. So, interoperability with other systems could be improved.

I began using it a few years ago. I was involved in testing and last year, I was tasked with some large projects in Azure which included databases, a data warehouse with SQL, and Azure SQL. It is a cloud-based service, which means that a project is easy to use and design. You can use different tools for different things, but all the visualization in Microsoft BI is all in one tool. 

Microsoft BI is stable and works consistently well. 

Microsoft BI is a very scalable tool. You can start small and build up your project as you wish. 

I used Microsoft Azure support because we have a project. I have a good relationship with Microsoft. I don't have any problems.

It is easy to install Microsoft BI. You simply download and install it from the Microsoft Microsoft BI website, and it is available to download on windows. It can be downloaded and installed in 5 minutes.

Microsoft BI is free for the personal edition, but there is also a paid-for professional version. Setting up Microsoft BI is simple.

Oracle products are well-engineered but too heavy to accomplish small tasks. However, to use it for enterprise, you need to have a lot of knowledge about the different kinds of tools available. It has more flexibility but is more complex because it's designed for enterprise-level systems. Comparing this to Oracle which is at least 10 years old. Java is also old, but it's more structured. It's more proprietary.

Every month Microsoft puts in another update. We are likely to use Microsoft BI in future projects. Microsoft BI does not fit every business case, so for that reason, I would give it an eight out of 10.