Microsoft Power BI Reviews

There are multiple workflows used in SharePoint and Salesforce. In ServiceNow, workflows are generated for each of the corporate functions such as HR, finance, ORM and others.

Microsoft Power BI is used extensively throughout the organization.

We are seeking agentic AI or analyzing AI which can help automatically analyze requirements and create workflows. Currently, we are creating these manually and must be involved in end-to-end testing. This involves two major parameters. To reduce the need for highly skilled personnel, we can engage someone who is just familiar and has a basic understanding of Microsoft Power BI, while AI can handle the major tasks through either agent AI or requirement analysis.

For example, as a lead, I can produce requirements that can be fed to the AI, which can then generate the workflow. It may also recommend how testing should be conducted, and test cases can be automatically generated by the agentic AI.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years. I serve as a lead for assessing tools, and whatever tool is being assessed is given to our team to use in their daily work.

This is a separate solution which we have implemented for some of our use cases that require the partition approach. On-demand basis operations can be performed without subscribing to the entire platform. We have subscribed to specific features of the platform and are paying for only those features.

The system operates in real-time.

We have not experienced any scalability issues. They are quite supportive with an online community and service desk available. If someone encounters any problems, we utilize these resources.

They are quite supportive with an online community and service desk available. If someone encounters any problems, we utilize these resources.

Positive

We previously used a different solution called UForge.

The initial setup was completed with this German product.

The organization maintains a platinum partnership which provides certain discounts and other benefits from this partnership.

The return on investment rating is eight out of ten.

There are associated setup costs.

There are multiple alternative solutions, particularly in SharePoint and Salesforce.

This is a separate solution which we have implemented for some of our use cases that require the partition approach. On-demand basis operations can be performed without subscribing to the entire platform. We have subscribed to specific features of the platform and are paying for only those features.

We are a platinum partner with Microsoft, so the tools automatically become part of our ecosystem. This follows the usual process of Microsoft.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

In my company, we use Microsoft Power BI only for monitoring because now it is the only software you can use to connect to Azure DevOps. We use the tool to monitor our environment, activities, and KPIs and evaluate bug rates and future values. In our company, we use agile scrum methodology, and for every activity that we create in our backlog, we monitor the life of the activity in our backlog. When we deliver the above-mentioned features, we use the Microsoft Power BI to monitor and create KPIs.

The dashboard is very nice and it is very simple to understand every single component. You would use a new task manager to monitor goals to manage your team, but I don't like that and would prefer to work with and learn a new tool that does monitoring. Sometimes, we use Azure to measure every dashboard and to monitor the activity in the scrum, but only under the dashboard. For example, more or less the two or three KPIs can be monitored using your monitoring tool.

In our company, we don't have any big problems with the tool because I have only one member from the main team who works on Microsoft Power BI to create, or sometimes, when we push the request to bring a new dashboard in the tool. I currently have two members working on the same dashboard, but only one member can work on the dashboard at a time. Whenever you work on the same dashboard or on the same code, Microsoft Power BI doesn't have a good architecture that allows multiple people to work on the same project.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for a year.

It is a stable solution. The tool is static after you create the language and put it inside the dashboard. You can schedule the report at a particular time in the day, making it a very simple tool with a scheduler to run your reports. I think it is a stable tool, but we don't stress a lot on our infrastructure with Microsoft Power BI. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

For me, scalability is hard to learn. I don't think it is a good tool for which the scalability part should be evaluated.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten.

The technical support for the solution is very fast, but finding the right technical person is not easy. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The problem with Microsoft Power BI is that we can use any language or developer language. Now, we have a small problem when different members of my team work on the same project on the same dashboard. We now connect Microsoft Power BI to Git, and we deliver it, but, of course, the tool is not engineered to function in such a manner. We face issues when lots of members work together.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud model, but I don't know what infrastructure is needed to use it. Five months ago, my company switched from the tool's on-premises version to the cloud one.

I find Microsoft Power BI to be the most effective for data integration.

Microsoft Power BI actually dramatically improved our company's data visualization, and if we are lucky, then we have the features inside of the tool itself, which we can develop, and it is a very fast process. When you need a new feature or a new dashboard, and when we don't have any good news on the internet from Microsoft, we need to develop such features from scratch, for which we spend a lot of time creating a new dashboard for monitoring purposes.

Microsoft Power BI impacted our operational costs, and the benefits are nice because you can monitor everything. The advantage that we have in Microsoft Power BI is something we need to learn, especially the new language and new tool, but it is not our focus because I am the leader of the software engineering team. Microsoft Power BI Power is a tool to support my team, and my first activity involved managing tasks.

Microsoft Power BI has handled scalability as our company's data analytics needs have grown because you can use the tool's scalability feature on the cloud. If I need to add a new member to work on Microsoft Power BI, I don't think it is good because every single person can work on a single dashboard offered by the tool, but if you would scale up, then you won't be able to work using one dashboard.

Though I have no idea how the maintenance is done, I know that it is a process carried out by our company's team members.

I rate the tool a five out of ten.

We have created the reports and are continuing to work on them. We are deploying them to the proxy, and the users are utilizing them for various business processes.

I work in Tableau or Tableau and Power BI. It can handle large data sets. You can just get the raw data. When it comes to Power BI, if you have to get the raw data and want to refresh it, the refresh at a point in time would degrade performance.

One of the key benefits of Power BI is how easy it is to develop reports. Even non-technical users can easily download the report and learn to include slicers and data filters once provided with a template. The platform is very user-friendly. Another advantage of Power BI is that if the report developer encounters any issues, they can quickly find solutions through Microsoft’s help resources. You can get your assistance by visiting the Microsoft support site or posting queries. This makes developing and delivering reports much easier. Microsoft Power BI provides much support and flexibility, making it a great tool for report generation.

It can integrate with different data sources. You can connect seamlessly to Databricks, SQL Data Warehouse, third-party sites, and multiple other sources.

We identified a couple of issues in the reports. Some reports took too long to load, particularly at the end of our data refresh. To address this, we optimized the data model using multiple tables, improving performance. Now, all reports are refreshing properly using DBP, and we’ve implemented these improvements in Power BI.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for two years.

The availability of Power BI is excellent. Once a user is set up, they can easily access and work with the Power BI files from the repository. There are also various modes for adding features, allowing users to combine data in different ways to make informed business decisions. 

Based on business discussions, there are 25 to 100 business users. The users work with templates, and we collect UAT feedback from them.

The initial setup was straightforward. Based on the current requirements, I've been able to develop the reports independently. It's easy to use and allows for faster reporting.

Once we generate the reports, we schedule and publish them on the website and then share the process with the users.

We're able to refresh the Power BI reports and create data models to support the business at this stage.

I'm working with a company that manages detailed sales data for the clothing industry. We're tracking orders, brands, seasons, and which facility handled the order, along with audits. We're focusing on metrics like fabric consumption and fiber content for reporting. 

We can develop reports in Power BI, including RxTx reports. Many of the business teams are also using Power BI. For support, we use Slack to manage tickets and TableLab for some tasks. Power BI offers a trial version, and you can get a pro license at a relatively low cost, with users having access to AV accounts. The main advantages are that it’s easy to use and more affordable compared to other reporting tools.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I use Microsoft Power BI for data visualization and IT studies. It is used primarily in my academic studies and courses, particularly in my visualization course, which is part of a master's program for individuals currently working in the industry. Students also use similar programs like Excel to monitor various issues.

Using Microsoft Power BI has significantly helped in analyzing large datasets. The solution allows for visualizing and connecting different Microsoft applications, which is beneficial for academic purposes.

The best features of Microsoft Power BI include its integration with other Microsoft products and its ability to connect applications within the Microsoft ecosystem. The product's overall integration within Microsoft's ecosystem is one of its strong points.

There are a few areas where Microsoft Power BI could be improved. For instance, spatial data support should be enhanced. Currently, it supports only topoJSON format for spatial files; other formats such as shapefiles or KML should also be supported to broaden the library.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for at least five years.

The stability of Microsoft Power BI is quite good. I would rate it a nine out of ten. However, there can be some difficulty in handling very large datasets, but overall, the stability is strong.

Dealing with very large datasets can be a bit difficult, which impacts the scalability to some extent.

I would rate Microsoft's customer support a seven out of ten. This rating may be influenced by my location in Turkey, making access to support somewhat challenging.

Neutral

I have used several other solutions, including Tableau and Looker. Each has its advantages, but generally, I prefer Microsoft Power BI first, followed by Qlik, and then Tableau.

The initial setup of Microsoft Power BI is straightforward and can be managed without significant issues. Using it for academic purposes, we mainly use the desktop version.

For companies, the program is cost-efficient. Academically, we use Microsoft Power BI for free through the licenses provided.

I evaluated Tableau, Looker, and Qlik before deciding on Microsoft Power BI. Each of these solutions has its own unique advantages.

Given the increasing need to analyze large datasets, I would definitely recommend Microsoft Power BI. It is a valuable tool for both academic and practical applications, particularly for those involved in data analysis and IT studies.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Dataverse is quite mature in terms of visualization. There are many interesting features for Power BI, such as role-level security, which allows you to control who sees what based on their roles. This is a cool feature, as you can separate reports depending on user departments or roles.

Real-time refresh is quite interesting and user-friendly, provided you have access to a gateway. It works well.

We have integrated it into the data warehouse.

It's not AI-driven. Although it has Copilot, which is in test mode, so it's not fully used.

Although there are many visualizations, most of them are paid separately because they have been developed by private developers. The visualizations that come off the shelf are quite few. 

You won't have very many common visualizations; you will have to download them from private developers, which come with their own limitations, or you have to pay.

I have been using it for more than three years. 

Stability is quite high. I haven't had any outages, so stability is also good. Maybe an eight or a nine.

I haven't had any issues with scalability. 

We are quite a big organization, and many of us use it without any issues. So far, I haven't had any hitches. I'll give it an eight out of ten. I haven't had an opportunity to use it in a very large organization, but for the number of users we have, it's been used without any issue.

If it's someone consuming the reporting, that could be over a thousand. But the people actually creating those reports are much fewer.

I personally use it daily. 

As a user, I haven't had any reason to contact them.

I have also used Tableau, but not to a very great extent. I have also used Oracle BI.

Power BI is more user-friendly and practical because it can democratize data. Anyone can use it, compared to other solutions that you might not be able to use unless you're in IT.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a ten out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy. It is very easy and straightforward. 

We use it on the cloud, on 365.

It's saving a lot of time. You can submit some of the processing, so you spend less time on it.

The licensing can be complicated because there are so many options. Maybe they can make it a bit simpler to understand.

It's one of the solutions I've used and been happy with.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. I would recommend it. 

We use it specifically for pure data analysis. 

I like the speed of building a visual and the transformation feature where you can make changes to the data, and then revert back very fast. These features, where you make transformations and then delete that step when you don't need them, are some of the best.

Power BI's integration with other tools is very good. With Power BI, if there are other systems on the network, you can easily connect to anything like SQL Server, Oracle, Amazon, Salesforce, SAP...anything you can easily connect. I have not faced difficulties with that.

The real-time data refresh capabilities is one of the things I had issues with. The refresh sometimes doesn't really work very well because there are two ways of connecting: direct and import. 

When it's direct, it's refreshed, but then you have limitations. But when you import the data, I feel there is always a limitation in the refresh. It is kind of like a room for improvement for Microsoft Power BI to work more on these real-time data refresh capabilities.

Microsoft Power BI changes almost every month; make changes regularly. I sometimes even see features that disappear, change, and update. So, I'm not keeping up. They are already doing a lot of changes. They keep updating regularly.

I have been using it for six to seven years. 

It's quite stable. Power BI is very stable.

It is very scalable. Almost everyone in our company uses it. 

I personally use it daily. 

I don't usually deal with customer service and support. It's our technical team that deals with them, but I don't see them complaining.

I used Excel. Power BI can crunch the data faster, and you can build a dashboard nicer and faster. Building a visual in Power BI is always easier, quicker, and simpler than Excel. It's Excel on steroids. 

I used to use Excel pivot tables a lot, but with Power BI, it's faster. It's easier to play with the data. If I want to make a list or put some formulas and stuff, Excel is good. But if I want to visualize the data, crunch it properly, and build measures quickly, Power BI is better.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy and one being very difficult. 

It is deployed both on-premises and the cloud. 

The deployment time varies and depends on the company. Every company is different. Here, internally, we have Microsoft Power BI Cloud, so it's easy. 

But in the previous company, we did not have Microsoft Cloud. So, to install, we had to install Microsoft Reporting Server and then Power BI internally. That took quite a while. 

But if you have Microsoft Cloud in your company, that's easy. And it's quicker on the cloud than on-premises.

Maybe a third party helped with the deployment. 

Downloading Power BI Desktop is free. But when you want to use the cloud, this is where I think it's per user payment. I'm not really very familiar with the licensing because I think they have more than one level. 

But to use Power BI internally for yourself, it's free. You download it. It's a free application.

I would recommend Power BI to other people. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

My company, we work as consultants. We help set up the environment for our customers. We do the initial setup for the customers so that they can use it. 

To a certain extent, we also set up dashboards and workplaces within Power BI for customers and run automation.

Our customers are mostly in security, finance, and some marketing companies.

The dashboards are valuable. We use them to help customers who are scattered across multiple countries. We can scope the access and information so that only relevant parties have visibility to what is relevant to their environment.

I haven't used real-time data processing much. It's more about the dashboards, where we play around. We work on Microsoft 365 and Azure and populate the dashboards with that information. Then, the dashboards are published to the end users so they can view relevant information.

The AI support is really good. We have plans to use the AI mechanisms and algorithms that Power BI uses to publish more easy-to-understand reports for our customers. We don't have to start things from scratch when we have metadata via AI. It integrates with the existing Power BI system and pulls up the data. It feels like they are being more open so that the data can be easily readable, and then using AI, it can be published in a better way.

The only issue is with permissions. Sometimes, despite granting granular permissions, dashboards are visible to people who shouldn't have access. It's difficult to understand why the permissions slip out.

Sometimes dashboards are visible to stakeholders even though they should not have permission. It's a bit difficult to understand why the permissions slip out.

The dashboards lack a user-friendly appearance, and the permissions should be easier to understand. At this point, we have to go through a lot of details. It takes a lot of time to understand the permissions, so if there were better options available within the Power BI setup, it would be quite beneficial, especially for admins.

So, there should be a more user-friendly dashboard appearance and easier-to-understand permissions.

I have been working with Power BI for two years. 

It is quite stable. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. I haven't heard any complaints from our customers. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. It still needs some more things within the system.

Our customers are mostly medium and enterprise businesses. 

The support has been good. It takes time for them to respond, but when they do, they are helpful. I would give it an eight.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. It's quite easy. Not that complicated. You just need the license, and then you're done.

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

It takes a couple of hours, four hours to eight hours. 

We are the integrators.

It did positively impact ROI. From a time perspective, at least four to six hours are saved because a lot of manual work is eliminated. Things are easily available, so people can do their work more efficiently.

When you have more number of users, like we have one customer with 200,000, it's a bit expensive. But I feel it's reasonable for small-scale customers.

I would recommend exploring it. A lot of features are available within Power BI. People complain that they want this or that, but everything is there. Explore it more, read through the documentation, and that would be helpful.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

My work is more about providing security solutions for about three years, making this service available to end users.   

My scope of work involves making the Power BI solution available as a general product to end users, ensuring that relevant security solutions are enabled from an identity perspective, licensing perspective, and from data loss prevention (DLP) and data protection perspective.

I work for a bank, so we are a customer of these services. We serve internal customers by making these solutions available.

Power BI can connect to various data sources. Depending on the business users, some may be using it along with their Excel sheets. The data source could be just the Excel sheet or a comma-separated values (CSV) file, where they receive data in that format from whichever application it is, and then they feed it into Power BI. 

Based on the business, they would have created analytic reports, and they are able to produce insightful analytic reports on the fly, based on management, end user, or stakeholder requirements. 

Users connect to the data source, which could be coming from SQL, Excel sheets, their own applications like SaaS applications, internal HR solutions, the intranet, etc. Different business users use it for different purposes to make Power BI connect to the data source and generate the required reports.

For our bank itself, there are various tools used by different business users. Some people use MicroStrategy; some use Cognos or its next product. We wanted to have one common tool that any business user can use for analytics. 

Power BI, once made available, can connect to various data sources, irrespective of the application, whether it be HR or business applications. The bank has many applications, but all eventually need to generate reports for tracking, distribution, or problem-finding based on analysis. Power BI was made available as part of the productivity suite to all businesses, which can connect to their applications and provide the reports and analysis they require. 

So, it's more of a strategic tool for the bank to consolidate different siloed business analytic tools with Power BI, serving everyone in the business regardless of what applications they use; they can use Power BI to generate reports.

Power BI also offers mobile app benefits for data access and analysis. The mobile app is available but only in read mode. We are a bank, so there are specific data protection capabilities required to make this available for use on mobile. However, it is already part of the BI suite, and it is easy for us to roll out using Intune. 

Intune is another product we use to manage applications on mobile devices. It can protect data in case someone tries to copy it out. While Power BI has a mobility function, the bank has to ensure that the right protection technology is available. Microsoft Intune integrates very well, allowing us to apply protection policies, but at this point in time, it has not been rolled out.

In Power BI, there are two types of users: power users and light users. For those who don't have heavy use, we allow them to use the web version, which is quite light. They don't need to do much—they can click, and there are templates available that allow them to quickly connect to the data source. 

Even novice users can make use of it, and then they can apply the company-wide protection policies available. For example, we use other Microsoft suites, like Azure Information Protection, etc. So, it integrates well with our Microsoft suite. That's one feature that is quite useful for all users, and their learning curve is very less. It's about the integrated productivity suites.

One of the things Power BI offers is, once connected, it provides tools for cleaning the data, shaping it for analysis, or transforming the data. For example, a user wants to load a comma-separated values (CSV) file and filter some of the data, focusing probably on creating reports based on two columns. It offers on-the-fly filtering capability, allowing them to clean by just removing unnecessary parts and focusing on the areas the user intends to create reports on. 

Then, if they want to perform calculations based on only those two columns or say they want to find all the customers who have contributed revenue of more than two million and have been with us for three years, these kinds of ad hoc reports can be quickly analyzed. This is for a novice user. 

For an advanced user who needs to build relationships between data, that kind of modeling is available; they can take two different data sources, extract, and manipulate relationships between these different Excel sheets or data sources, and then match and append the data. It provides that transformation capability. Other tools also provide this, but because it is well integrated, and for those who are familiar with Microsoft Excel, it feels very familiar.

Some of the features are interactive as well. The dashboards are quite interactive, providing visualization templates quickly. Of course, there are plenty of other tools, but Power BI helps to integrate with our internal productivity tools. People are familiar with it, and it offers all the essential capabilities other tools provide in terms of data cleaning, transformation, or data modeling.

So, comparing Power BI to MicroStrategy, for example, some other tools are quite robust in terms of data analytics. 

From a scalability and performance perspective and based on my understanding and feedback from end users, there's room for improvement in data processing, scaling up, and leveraging the cloud. That could be an enhancement area for me to look into.

I have been working with it for three years. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. It is pretty stable. 

Personally, I use it every week because I need to generate reports for my team. Given the size of our bank, it is being used every day by various departments.

Microsoft is responsive.

Positive

We used different solutions, ranging from Excel to Microstrategy to various other business automation tools.

Power BI became part of our toolkit after we moved to Microsoft Office 365. It fits the requirements of 70% to 80% of the people in the bank, making it a strategic tool. If there are special needs, individuals might choose other tools, but overall, it is available for all users.

So, the bank has an Office 365 contract with Microsoft, which includes various services like SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. It is used as a productivity solution in the bank. In doing so, we also need to mitigate risks, such as malicious attachments, links, and files attempting to steal credentials.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps the bank mitigate these risks. It performs real-time scanning and uses machine-learning algorithms to help us detect and block threats. So, we use it as part of our Office 365 to mitigate risk against our productivity suite of applications.

There are three Defender products.

• One is Microsoft Defender for Office 365, also known as MDO.
• The other products under the Defender category are Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Defender for Identity.

So, there are three products: MDO, which is used for Office 365; Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, which is used as an endpoint solution on desktops; and Microsoft Defender for Identity, which is a sensor used in our identity management. The one we mainly use is MDO.

Power BI has good integration capabilities with Microsoft suite products and backend products like SQL and SharePoint, both on-premise and online, as well as other internal applications using databases like SQL or Oracle.

The Power BI on the cloud is very easy. Just turn on the license, but there is some administrative work to be done. 

On a scale from one to ten, rolling out Power BI is probably an eight out of ten, compared to other products, which can be very complicated. However, there's the question of whether it can handle large datasets as well as other tools or provide advanced analytics on par with tools like MicroStrategy. That's what I understand from our end users who deal with huge amounts of data. 

There are areas like statistical modeling or forecasting where other tools might be slightly better. But those use specialized tools compared to Power BI. 

Otherwise, in terms of integration, it's quite easy. Mobility is easy. From an administrative perspective, setting up is very easy because it's just part of Office 365, and we can package and roll it out as a desktop tool as well.

The Power BI license is available on the cloud, so those who have licenses can use it there. It is also available as a desktop client app for those wanting to do more robust reports. It is packaged as part of a desktop product and pushed as a desktop point.

Our business units consume it directly from us at the whole bank level; we make it available. If a department needs specialization, they may get consultants or hire people specialized in Power BI, depending on their requirements. They might put in more effort or recruit manpower to bring in the expertise needed by the bank. 

If a team is already well-versed with business analytics professionals, it's straightforward. However, for a team like us, we might send one or two people for a week's training with Microsoft or another provider. It's not a complicated product for small-scale use. For handling large databases, specialized recruitment may be necessary to manage the workload effectively.

Deployment is very efficient. We have a standard packaging team. As part of the desktop image, when people request, it is pushed through Microsoft SCCM. Packaging takes some time, which is standard across all products. 

When people request, it's automatically pushed. So it's all automated for us. From an end-user perspective, it's very transparent, auto-provisioned on demand.

It's cheap compared to other solutions.

I would recommend using this solution. Within the bank, we mandate the use of Power BI first. If it can't meet specific requirements, then departments might look for other solutions. 

Outside the company, I would say it's value for money, especially for those with a lot of SQL databases or .NET applications. It's a product worth considering for its value.