Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I have been a professor at a program mastery at UISEK University for the past two years where I teach students how to use these tools.

Being able to transfer data with the Power Query feature is great for teaching with about one to two hundred rows of data. I am also able to see the relationship between multiple tables and create various sheets and dashboards.

The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script.

Additionally, in the next release, I would like to be able to export thing, such as charts, as a PDF.

I have been using this solution for two years.

Microsoft BI's most valuable feature is flexibility.

The performance of Microsoft BI could improve for large datasets and it would be beneficial to have more visualization features.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately two years.

The solution is stable, but not as good as other tools I use.

Microsoft BI is a scalable solution.

The support of Microsoft BI is good.

Microsoft BI is very cost-effective and this is why we use it.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

I am a reseller for Sage business solutions and will start to sell Microsoft BI.

Microsoft BI is primarily used for sales, financial, and production reports.

I believe that it's a good solution. 

It is not an expensive solution. The price is very important in the solution selection process. In my opinion, Microsoft BI is a low-cost solution, and it could be an interesting solution for a tourism company.

I have been using Microsoft BI for a few months.

As a cloud solution, we are always working with the latest version.

In our company, we have five users.

The price is an important consideration when upgrading or adding new users. In my opinion, it would be better for the price to be degressive by the user. For example, if you have five users, you simply multiply five by the unit price to find the total cost of the solution. 

I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users.

I hadn't really needed Microsoft's technical support until now. We have not had any issues to resolve.

The installation is not a difficult thing, it is very simple.

We only need one IT manager, to deploy this solution.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis.

I would recommend this solution to others who are considering this solution, which is the reason that I will be selling it.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

We use this as a data validation tool.

It has improved the organization because now we can connect Power BI directly with the Microsoft team. So it creates a more direct feed among the teams.

I like how it has the capacity to share the contents of the report easily. The data validation is great, too. It's easy to learn, so it's easy to teach how to use the Power BI for a team, and it's easier to build the parts.

The performance, the ETL, is not so good. Also, I believe Power BI could improve how to add filters to the visualization dashboard because we don't see an easier way how to apply them. We can't filter the table directly, so we always have to do separate filtering for parts of the dashboard.

In the next release, I'd like to see the option to share personalized validation of the users, let them see one another. I'd also like to see the capacity to get filters in the table.

I have been using this solution for about two years. 

The stability is not so great because when you have to improve your performance, you have to double your storage, so sometimes it becomes very expensive.

When you have to scale up, you must to pay double because you can't just scale up 10 or 15%. You need to double your extra storage, so it's really bad.

The customer support is good, they have great technical support. Sometimes they can't help with some features, but most of the times that we've had a problem, they were able to solve it for us. So, it's good. 

The initial setup was straightforward. Really simple. The deployment took about a week.

The reseller was Dell, who was great. I have no complaints about the seller. They have a good number of consultants that know all about Power BI, so getting help was easy.

Licensing is done on a yearly basis, and it is a standard fee.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. I would suggest using Power BI with a good detail tool behind it, and just using Power BI as a validation tool, not for the whole BI process.

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

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

There's a lot of room for improvement because Power BI is a new tool and hasn't really been in the market for that long, especially considering alternative tools such as MicroStrategy or Tableau which have been around for more than a decade. Because Power BI is younger than those tools, I feel it hasn't reached a certain level of maturity that comes with time and it is lacking in quite a few areas which I'm hoping will be seen to in the future, given how it has been progressing so far with its new releases.

There is no specific area that I have a problem with. It's just that, with whatever feature you come across, every visual has its own formatting and behavior. What you get in one visual for a feature, you don't seem to get in another.

When it comes to the feature's functionality, that's all fine, but, say, for instance, that you want to go ahead and turn off only the sub totals and not the grand totals. This might not be immediately possible, especially if you are working in a project where your technical solution is the backend site which the users don't quite care about. What they care about is what they see and interact with, and the visuals and formatting (and visual settings) at hand are what really matter to them.

This is where I think standardization really needs to come in. Basic stuff like being able to selectively turn on or off only the sub totals or grand totals. There should be certain formatting options which should be standard across every visual. What options you get here, you should also get over there, for example. These are simple things, but many a time it's something the end user takes very seriously. They generally do not care about what's happening in the background with regard to the calculations and everything else.

In essence, the standard visualizations should have features and options in common with one another, even when it comes to other visualization tools such as bar charts and line charts. These are all pretty basic visualization features, and giving them some standard way to be customized will make them as capable and competitive as what other tools allow you to do. Of course, you can do this if you add your own custom visuals from the library, but when it comes to basic default stuff, they should at least be deep enough in terms of standard customization to compete.

Right now it seems like they're trying to add a lot of features, but at the expense of losing out on the essence of the basics. The basics in Power BI should be equally as good as the basics in any other tool, and in this case I believe it to be a problem of adding more depth to certain features. The width, and variety, of features is not a problem for me. Whatever features are already available need to be deep enough to work with comfortably, and I feel this is where Microsoft needs to direct its focus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Microsoft PowerBI a seven out of ten.

I would rate the stability of Microsoft BI at 70 percent. 

While the solution is scalable, it certainly has its limitations.

I find the solution to be 70 percent stable. 

Although the solution comes with limitations, it is scalable. 

Technical support is not that bad, fairing in the average range. 

The solution is not that difficult to install, although this will vary with the experience of the person responsible for its installation. 

There are five people responsible for the deployment, their roles comprising a mixed bag, some of them being managers. 

Our customers definitely incur a licensing fee. 

The only other cost, besides the licensing fee, would be to cover support. 

There are only three customers using the solution at present. 

I always offer more than one solution and the person must choose which he feels best suits his needs. All solutions have plusses and minuses and these should be carefully weighed before one decides which one to go with. Once the client has settled on a solution, this is what I will go with. We are talking about Microsoft store. Generally speaking, our clients prefer to make use of Microsoft. 

I rate Microsoft BI as a seven out of ten. 

This rating is based on what we have observed about the solution thus far, although it may be amended over the next few months as we become more acquainted with it. 

The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are the variety of possibilities to connect to various data sources. The visualizations are easily done, have useful rollover functions, and there are continuous updates being made to the system. You can benefit from the various improvements.

I'm missing collaborations functionality to operate or to work connected with multiple people on a data source or on virtualization. There should be more collaborations functions, such as in Confluence. We haven't explored the solution sufficiently in this area, but at this time it doesn't look sufficient.

I would want one platform, which can be used for top management meetings where you see and comment on the data. That would be a perfect combination. Everybody has access, sees the status, the data, and the comments, and that will make life easier for us.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately three years.

Microsoft BI is stable.

I have found Microsoft BI to be scalable.

The technical support from Microsoft has been good.

The setup is good. Everybody can test and try the solution, it's not rocket science. There is a lot of training and courses available. We decided to have a separate workforce for that purpose which is doing nothing else than Microsoft BI every day in India. It has been very effective.

I rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

I like how the Query Editor lets me manipulate the data, and the available visuals are good. You can do everything using the UI.

Integration with artificial intelligence would help. Humans take time to review the data and eliminate errors. Artificial intelligence based on machine learning and understanding can bring the same functionality.

I've worked with Microsoft BI for a few years.

Power BI has been stable so far. 

Power BI is scalable. 

I haven't called technical support about Power BI. I've consulted the documentation when necessary and checked blogs to rectify my issues. 

It's fairly easy to set up Power BI.

I think the price is fair, but I can't speak for most Indian customers.

I rate Microsoft Bi nine out of 10.