Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I use Microsoft BI for my own projects that are related to integrating with Excel datasets. I use the visualization and graphing functions, and I have tried using the Python integration.

The most valuable feature is integration with Python.

The integration with third-party products could be more stable.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately one month.

Microsoft BI could be a little more stable.

We have approximately 10 users. I don't expect that we will expand our usage or continue using this product.

I have not been in contact with technical support.

There is no complexity in the initial setup. It takes approximately 15 minutes to deploy.

There are twenty people in the team that handles the deployment and maintenance of our solutions.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have integrated this solution into the software that we created for a client specifically for reports and data consumption. It is a hybrid infrastructure project with hybrid integration. It has a lot of reports executed or created from the cloud.

It has helped us to have a really quick view of the most important indicators of the operational issues of our platform. It has enabled collaboration between different operational levels in the company.

The use of graphics to show and view the data indicators is the most valuable feature. It is also very stable.

Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions.

It has good stability.

We haven't used it a lot, but it seems good so far. We have only three users. We may include two or three more users to the platform.

Their technical support is bad. I didn't like the technical support of Microsoft.

We also use Oracle and Tableau.

The initial setup was not complex, but we would like a more agile process. The initial deployment took about two months. The platform that we created was very robust.

We are a reseller of the solution. We did the deployment.

We were thinking of integrating Tableau instead of Microsoft BI, but the client chose Microsoft BI.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for integrating into our ERP so people can have a dashboard analysis of whatever is important to analyze or compare, whether it be top-selling products or sales performance, or quota analysis.

Just as a BI tool, there's not much difference between solutions. It works well with our product and it's something that customers are familiar with and they often already have a lot of licensing with Microsoft. It's an easy add-on to their users.

There's generally a sense of familiarity with the product.

It integrates with all of the Microsoft tools.

It's not even fair for me to respond on that as that's not my wheelhouse. I don't know how easy it is as I'm not doing any of the designs. Therefore, I have not had any real training on it. I don't think that's fair for me to criticize anything that they're doing.

The initial setup is a little bit technical and what an end user wants to see is always a moving target.

The solution needs better technical support.

I've been using the solution for about three years at this point.

In terms of stability, we haven't had any challenges with it at this point. As with multiple integrations across several companies we tend to make whatever change is best for the biggest base of clients. We haven't had any issues thus far.

Technical and end user support is something that might be lacking from Microsoft. As a user when I want to find an answer to, "Hey, how do I do this?" I often get better answers by going to a  website of a company that represents them than I do going directly to their site.  Maybe they do that on purpose to help drive business to those people, however, it would be helpful if it was more centralized and the quick and simple steps answers that I get elsewhere.

I have some past experience with solutions such as Tableau and Cognose but not integrated into this ERP product.  We chose one that we would feel would be on a common platform of our customers.

The setup is fairly straightforward but implementation is a little bit complex mostly due to how the customer driven scope changes often as they realize the power of a BI tool and want to be able to expand it's use.

We're on a Progress platform, so that's a little more technical on our side at the beginning of the original project.

The licensing costs vary. It all depends on the individual customer due to the fact that Microsoft's options are modular. For example, they have Microsoft Office suite, then they add CRM and then you might add BI.  It's not expensive per user, however, as you increase the functionality or add different tools, it becomes more expensive.

We qualify as a partner as we're a software distributor. We're using the most current version of the solution.

Here is the biggest thing: when you look at any BI tool or if it's the first time you're implementing one, you can easily get over enticed by the flashy display or the common things. However, it's the ability to drill down to your true business processes that are going to make it or break it as being the right tool or accesses the right information. Somebody that gets a BI tool for the first time will open a dashboard and say, "Oh, that's important for me to see every day." However, the reality is, when using a dashboard view you're looking for a red flag or highlights. The power of the BI tool is allowing you to drill down to the data behind the dashboard, that's where the real testing comes in.  Figuring out where to get the information from and how best to analyze it.  That's my best BI tool advice. Anybody can make a dashboard look pretty. It has to be useful too.

In general, I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

This solution is primarily used for business analytics. We generate reports so that the business analytics team can use them for their analysis.

Previously, we used Excel to perform the analysis. It was very tedious for them to get data into Excel, do the refresh, and generate the reports. Now, using Microsoft BI, they can connect directly with the data, it gets refreshed automatically, and they don't have to worry about refreshing it.

They get the data in the report section and they don't have to worry about report generation, data modeling, and other aspects.

The most valuable feature is the reporting. It's easy to create reports and it's easy to download the data from the corresponding report.

This product enables self-service BI.

The paginated report functionality, which was intended to replace SPSS, is not yet up to the mark. We would like improvements made to the paginated reports so that it produces quality similarly to SSRS.

There is no automation for paginated reports, so then need to make it automated.

Ultimately, I would like to see all of the features from SSRS that are missing. That's ideally what I would like to have.

I have been using Microsoft BI for the past 10 years.

This product is pretty stable.

Scalability depends on the kind of reports and data we are looking at. It has multiple features for us based on the functionality and the requirement of the customer. It's not limited only to enterprise-specific customers. Rather,  It can be used by small, medium, as well as enterprise-based customers.

There is no limitation as such. So it's quite scalable.

I have work two different companies at this time, and as far as I know, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 people who use this product.

The quality of support depends on the Microsoft partner that you are working with. 

We have not faced any significant issues, but when we have, we raised a bug with the Microsoft technical team and they have resolved things accordingly.

This is the only tool that we are using for reporting. Previously, we used Crystal Reports.

We deployed this product ourselves. We used the documentation that is available at Microsoft.com.

The cost of licensing depends on the number of people that are going to be using the reports, and we are satisfied with it at $10 per user.

Our company focuses on Microsoft products, so we did not evaluate solutions by other vendors.

My advice is that if you are looking for an aggregated level of data, using it for reporting, then it's better to use Power BI because everything will be in memory and it will be much faster.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The dashboard features are really valuable, you can connect to multiple data points. Overall, the solution is easy to use.

The solution could be more customizable and you do not have enough freedom on the code.

I have used the solution for one year.

The install was straightforward and the advanced dashboards operate on well-branded tablets.

The premium licensing is approximately $5,000 per month which is pretty expensive.

If you are planning on implementing Microsoft BI, having experience with other Microsoft products will make using this solution easy and straightforward. 

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

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. 

We are a service provider and Microsoft BI is one of the tools that we implement for our clients. We do not use it ourselves.

My primary use case is integration, but it is also used for reporting and data analysis services.

The user interface is easy to work with.

More connections with other systems should be added, which would allow for other integrations.

I have been using Microsoft BI for between eight and nine months.

Microsoft BI is a stable product.

I do not have experience with technical support. In cases where I have found an issue, I Google it, spend time learning about the problem, and then resolve it.

I have also used Alteryx and Informatica. We still may use one of these other products, depending on our client's requirements. If the client wants us to work using a specific product then that is their choice.

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment will take an hour, or an hour and a half.

We deployed this product ourselves. It is easy to work on.

I primarily use Microsoft BI for integration, so it is difficult for me to say what needs to be improved. Overall, this is a good tool and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

In general, we use it to have access to the data that we have processed from the HCM system and also to deploy it to the teams. Because it has low-level security features, I can guarantee that only selected people have access to the information seamlessly. We don't take a lot of steps to create, for example, different profiles and ensure the data security that I need.

It is on the cloud because we have pro accounts. Usually, we have the desktop version for designing and using ourselves here, but when we deploy this, it is usually on the Microsoft cloud; it is not on-premises. We are using the most updated version because they release monthly updates.

The querying capabilities are the most valuable because they allow me to build many automations. We have many workflows and many databases that we work on a daily basis. They need to be updated quite quickly. In order to not to take much of our time doing these updates manually, I have set up these automations using the systems. The process is just to ingest the data and reprocess it. Every time I click a button, everything is updated in almost real time.

It is by far the easiest system not only for querying but also for data modeling, data visualization, and deployment. It is light years ahead of Tableau and even Microsoft Excel to do these kinds of things. It is very easy to use and set up, and it has a lot of videos on the internet.

I would like it to be a little bit more secure when I'm using the design feature on my desktop. For example, to have the ability to set up security passwords for opening the file. Currently, they don't have that.

Tableau, for example, has a visual way of doing data processing steps, whereas the Power BI system still has some code, although it is very low code. It would be great to have the kind of view that Tableau has.

I have been using this solution for around two and a half years. I am currently using it, and I have also used it in the previous company.

It is very stable and very reliable. It is by far the most reliable system I have used for deploying many things.

It is very scalable, especially because the pricing was great. Right now, they are integrating a lot with Microsoft Power Apps and the Power Platform as a whole. Power Ultimate and other things are being integrated into the system as well.

In my previous company, more than 200 to 300 people were using it on a daily basis. In my current company, we have less than ten people using it because we are still a very confined team.

The technical assistance is great, and I have never had any problems with them. Their support to communities is also great. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

The initial setup was very easy. It took a little bit less than a month to get everything designed, tested, and deployed after we got the licenses.

Its pricing is great.

The first piece of advice is to become very clear about licensing and the data governors. Always get the licenses and get them right. You must also be clear about who is going to control these accesses. The second piece of advice is to understand a lot about the low-level security to create profiles and data access features to allow the specific data to be seen only by a specific public.

Currently, in my organization, the greatest challenge is getting proper licensing. We have a little bit of resistance from our IT department who would like us to use Tableau more. It is not Microsoft's problem. It has more to do with the vendor of choice of the company, and they say that we have to use Tableau, but I don't want to use Tableau.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. It deserves this rating.