Microsoft Power BI Reviews

The best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. 

I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use.

A few features available in Tableau are not available in Power BI. For example. Tableau has the ability to make up the physical layer and all other stuff at runtime. In Power BI, we have to develop a proper physical layer to connect it.

The limitation that we normally face is related to the direct query mode. When it comes to the direct query mode, most of the functionality is not working, which is an issue for us. We have to use the direct query mode frequently because the client needs real-time data. They should work on this limitation.

There are a lot of other technical things that need to be improved. I am also following the Power BI platform and Microsoft Support Center platform on the web where users have put their requirements. Microsoft is also working on improving this solution. In every update, they add new features to this solution.

I have been using this solution for more than four years.

It is stable. I haven't found it hanging. It consumes a lot of memory on the local system but not while developing the reports. It also depends on the data on which we are working, but generally, it is light and stable.

My overall experience with Microsoft is actually quite good. We have contacted their technical support once or twice. It was something related to the Power BI visualization, where we needed to visualize some data, but they had some kind of limitation in personalization. We also wanted to connect Power BI with other servers, but we were facing some performance issues. The reports were not working fine. I don't think they managed to solve our issues.

I have worked on SiteSense and Oracle OBIEE. I feel more satisfied when I'm working with Power BI. It is more convenient as compared to other solutions.

The initial setup is easy. I didn't find any complexity in it. It can be difficult if the end users don't know how to use it. If they are trained on it, then after a week or a month, it gets easier for the end users. 

Its cost seems to be unreasonable if you have many users, but for a lesser number of users, it is reasonable. It is $10 per month. Clients easily accept this option, so they must think it is reasonable. 

It is quite cheap as compared to other tools, such as Tableau. One of the best things about this solution is that it has a trial version.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

It is mostly used for monthly cost reports for our department. We are also using it as a dashboard for giving some overview for management purposes. We are using the latest version.

Its seamless integration with Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Excel, is the most valuable.

They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. 

They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use.

I have been using Microsoft BI for almost two and a half years.

Stability is quite good as long as you have proper sizing from the beginnings. If you do the right sizing keeping in mind the current usage as well as future growth, it is good.

It is scalable. We have around 65 seniors managers who use it on a weekly or monthly basis. Some reports are done weekly and some monthly.

I have not contacted them so far. I am from the user side. We contact our centralized IT department for any issues. If they have a technical issue that requires further escalation, they will directly contact Microsoft technical support.

The initial setup is quite simple, but for the product use, you need to have people who have got experience of at least three to six months in using these applications. It took us two months to deploy across the company.

We have a core team that gets training from a Microsoft partner. We then deploy it ourselves. After six months of using this solution, some of the key users get advanced training. 

We also maintain it ourselves. We have around ten people for its maintenance.

It is somewhere in the middle in terms of price. Licensing is quite clear.

We reviewed some other intelligence tools, and we just used them for trials.

I would recommend this solution, especially for the companies that mostly use Microsoft products and ecosystem. I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

Daily updated production indicators dashboard: We get production data (Number of pieces, downtime, and downtime reasons) from the shopfloor and input them on an Excel sheet. 

PowerBi is used to import our production data and generate dashboards, then integrates other Excel sheets to provide managers dashboards. This helps them get insights to make better OEE improvement decisions, mainly where to focus resources. We became able to see indicators from any time frame (day, week, month, or year), then could make better decisions.

With this solution, we were able to know which problems were critical and chronic. Once we used Power BI for production management, we realized that we could also use it for quality assurance, finance, and others types of management.

Interactive graphs are its most valuable feature.

Real-time updating needs improvement.

Two years.

Our primary use for this solution is geospatial analysis.

This solution has provided an accurate analysis of our customers repurchasing the same plan for telecom Jio. It has provided customer purchase patterns and great visualization.

The most valuable features are the visualization and integration with Office365.

This solution needs integration with SAS and more deep analysis functionality.

I have been using Microsoft BI for five years.

Our primary use is real-time & batch analytics on Postgres databases in combination with MS Excel.

This solution has improved our ability in making decisions and explaining data.

The most valuable features are the automation of analysis and already prepared tools to do the analytic work rapidly.

We would like to have better SQL support for queries. It means to have a kind of development environment trying to correct bad sintax in SQL query, or having an intellisense like style for code completion being aware of table's fields and having a preview of the query response without needing to run the whole procedure. 

We have been using Microsoft BI for two months.

Previously we used MS Excel but continue using it mainly for prototyping.

Power BI free layer is attractive and second stage with Power BI online is not expensive.

Tableau.

Power BI is a great tool for analytics. It is useful if you have a requirement to create a dashboard with self-service capability, along with KPIs, and you want to drill down to the data details.

I have tried SSRS and later moved to Power BI. SSRS requires every analytical feature to be implemented separately. However, with the appropriate granularity of data, you can drill down and drill up easily which gives you a different view of the dashboards. Now with having on-premises availability, it makes this tool even more powerful.

If you are not very technical this tool could be very useful.

The most valuable features are:

• Self service
• Inbuilt analytics
• Custom visualization
• Printing of dashboard helps a lot
• Dashboard scheduling
  
• Easy collaboration with other users on Power BI
• Learning curve for this tool is small
• Dashboard refresh rate can be configured
• Power BI works both on-premises and cloud

Adding paginated reports to this tool could be of great help for users who want to move away from SSRS. 

I would like to see built-in Git support, incremental loading of data, and a machine learning model for predictive analysis.

Custom colouring from the dashboard itself would be helpful.

I have been using Microsoft BI, SSRS, and Power BI for four years.

I have developed and deployed more than twenty separate customer solutions. I am a Business Intelligence Deployment Specialist. The most significant implementation was to reduce the Financial consolidation time for one hundred and twenty companies into one shareholder report, from thirty days to four minutes.

We help customers deploy and analyze sophisticated analytics models. These models have helped them all to get a better insight into their data and many of them have found very valuable insights that made them more profitable, more efficient, and in some cases changed the direction of the business.

The feature I find most valuable is the ability to publish Power Bi reports, using an embedded link, directly onto a website. Data that is not classified as confidential can very easily be exposed to customers, vendors, or even just visitors to the web site.

I would like to see Machine Learning for Power Bi Pro users or an intermediate license to enable Machine Learning if you don't have access to a Premium account.

The minimum embedded capacity for Machine learning is currently an A3 capacity, and this should be reduced to include A1 level licenses.

The primary use case was mainly to create dashboards and present them for reporting purposes. We use Microsoft Power BI to create dashboards, provide insights, and use its various analytical and insight functions to send to either the departmental manager or the general manager of marketing and sales or retail ops.

In short, we had to create sales reports. The sales reports needed to be emailed to the different sales managers all across New Zealand. The Excel file data had to be filtered manually, whereas, in Power BI, you can set restrictions. For example, if you have North, South, East and West branches, you can set corresponding restrictions, while allowing the national sales manager to view the entire data without having to do a lot of filtering, because of the restrictions involved.

It is time-saving for the person who creates the report and also a lot of that is automated, whereas with Excel you've got to keep working on it and keep filtering it all the time.

Our most valuable features are the dashboard and the reporting feature because, before that, our organization used to only use Excel. There was a lot of manual work involved with Excel, whereas once we moved on to Microsoft Power BI, it was a cleaner dashboard and it was faster too. The end user also had an opportunity to alter the reporting as per requirements with Power BI.

I haven't experienced any issues with it right now, so I can't really advise on that part.

I think because I'm moving more into RPA, I'd definitely like to see integration across the RPA, Power BI, or Tableau platforms because that integration could then make automation and mundane reporting much faster.

You'll always require some more complex reports that the analyst could work on, but the very standard sales reports could then be automated very quickly using Power BI and RPA together.

Stability is pretty good. I've been using other services from Microsoft and the support also has been really good so it's a very stable platform and the support services are excellent.

I've been using it for a year and it's only across my single department so I've not yet had to scale it to a very large level.

Across my department, there are two users. Across other departments at my company, there are many more. Most users are commercial or insights analysts.

Across our organization, Power BI is not extensively used, although I'm not privy to every department and their plans. I think it's being used moderately, but could be used more.

In terms of Microsoft Power BI, if there was ever a query, you can find support online. There's a lot of help available but what I generally meant was I have been using Microsoft Office products through the Office 365 subscription business and the support of Microsoft Office, in general, has always been really good. They usually come back on the very same day and try and solve the problem. This is not something I've experienced with other platforms in the past.

We hadn't previously used another solution. We were just using Excel and decided to go to a much better platform.

The setup was straightforward for me because as part of an organization, I didn't have to set it up myself. It was set up via the organization, through the IT department, so it was pretty straightforward.

I adopted it in my team, but it was already being implemented across other parts of the company. I just brought it into my department, so I wouldn't be able to tell the time frame for the actual implementation strategy. For my team alone, it probably took me around two months or so.

The other departments in my company were using Power BI, so it would not make sense to get another solution when they already had Power BI in other parts of the organization.

Microsoft Power BI is definitely a good product and Microsoft has a good integration of a good suite of products across the range. I think if you take UI parts recent release, for example, I'm not sure that does it with Power BI but it definitely integrates it across the Microsoft Office activities, so I think it's only a matter of time before a majority of the Microsoft Office products start integrating with UI parts. That would take analysis, reporting, and automation to the next level and we could free up time for the general reporter.

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten because it's easy to use and there is a lot of support online. I think Microsoft Office itself has a lot of support being provided. In addition, I like its features and it's growing much faster than some of the other analytical tools out there, although it started off later.