Microsoft BI Reviews

Microsoft BI is great if you and your team have used Microsoft products for a long time. Connecting Microsoft BI to your current processes will be a breeze. The software also makes it easy to create executive dashboards and automated data reporting. For simple financial reporting, Microsoft BI is as easy as they come.

For large and complex datasets, Microsoft BI excels in presenting the data in a manageable and informative way. Its graphical interface does a great job of quickly and easily displaying data, and the reporting tools are well above average for analytical software. It is also great when used in conjunction with other Microsoft products, but does not do well when paired with alternate programs.

If you are part of an enterprise that is running daily reports to many users, and you want to up your game by making visually stunning, easy to follow reports, PowerBI is the tool for you and well worth the cost. If you are in an environment that runs one report a month, the cost might not be worth it just for some bells and whistles.

Dashboarding with simple data relationship.

In the oil and gas industry, it's common to be analyzing geospatial items along with cross-sectional data, and this can easily go over the row limit that Microsoft BI has for its map visualization; this is a shortfall.

For high-level dashboarding, say, aggregated data for management reporting, Microsoft BI is perfectly suited due to its professional layout and ease of deployment. The data modeling aspect in Microsoft BI leaves much to be desired as it doesn't allow for many relationships which are rather common in the data used in our industry; this forces users to create a unique key by having to concatenate columns of interest, which tend to result in untidy data and make maintenance difficult.

You can have Microsoft BI in any scenario since it can gather information from many different sources. You also need to take into consideration that Microsoft BI provides a lot of resources to developers allowing you to customize and do much more with this tool. In some circumstances where you need to build graphics in real time from sources where you need a task to import the data, it can be cumbersome.

Well Suited:
Reporting numbers for accounting to an executive team that can be displayed and referenced frequently.

Microsoft BI is well suited for a data landscape that traverses multiple business units. its ability to bring different type of information together and communicate it in a more concise manner is great. Scenarios that required continuous monitoring and team communication, Microsoft BI is perfect. The ability to access the information on the fly through the mobile app is outstanding.

The interface is good, and even we can use drag and drop functionality to create packages and reports and other tasks.

If your primary use case requires the use of several visualisation options and graphical representations, then Microsoft BI might be a good option to use. However, if your data management needs do not revolve around reporting, then it is better to go with other standard business intelligence tools available in the market like Oracle BI or Tableau.

It's a great tool that offers full benefits of self-service BI with very little need for interaction with the IT department. The Power BI Desktop and Mobile application, in particular, has added a lot of value for our business objectives.

Microsoft BI is a terrific tool to use when you need to pull data from various sources, and especially powerful in its ability to display the actionable information on a single dashboard. It is the "go-to" solution for the company that wants to move to the next level of pivot tables, dynamic charting and business intelligence reporting.

It is extremely well suited for companies (of any size) dealing with large data quantities who have to compile and analyze the data in a short amount of time. I have found it very efficient for my company, as it allows a lot of flexibility for data display and is so user-friendly.

Very affordable, well suited for anyone who wants to try out business intelligence and data visualization without a large time investment up front to get it going.

Not appropriate for very large databases, it can take large datasets a while to load into BI. Not a lot of granularity provided out of the box, though there are many add ons to provide further functionality available.

Flexibility, engagement, training resources, updates, cost, implementation, ease of use, support; these are the reasons why I would recommend Power BI. Power BI is best suited for situations where collaboration is needed among several different groups who are working concurrently on different activities. Where there are multiple levels of data that need to be parsed through. It's difficult to think of a scenario where it wouldn't be beneficial other than the obvious.

Microsoft BI is well suitable for Data Mining, Data Analyzing, Reporting, Data Visualizing, Prediction, Data Insight, Distributed Dashboards, Private Dashboards, Complex Data Analysis and Data gathering from any resource (Web, Excel, SQL, Access, Oracle, Text, Google Analytics, MailChimp, many more) projects.
Microsoft BI is less suitable for Big Data, especially if data is larger than a TB.

If you want Excel on steroids in terms of graphs and data analysis - this is your beast. It has all kinds of visualizations available and you can filter the data to make it as precise as you want. We use it for managing the data from the mobile app and to create visual reports of the users' actions.

Well suited for:
- Customers with a Microsoft landscape who use MS Office or Office 365, SQL Server and Active Directory a lot.
- Departmental deployments.
- Self-Service Capabilities
- Small Budgets
- Mobile Capabilities

Some issues with:
- non-Microsoft environments
- Complex data sources like SAP.
- Complex calculations in Power BI

The software is really well designed to make presentations and graphics once the data in the sheets are complete and there are no more corrections. Instead, if you feel that you need corrections you will have to start the process over again. It's frustrating. I think this software requires more capabilities than others, network knowledge and how the Microsoft software is connected.

Integrations with SQL Server or Azure databases - there is a lot of documentation online that supports this implementation, and it has very accessible pricing options.

Most suitable scenarios:
-Large scale report automation and distribution.
-Self service BI for internal and external users.
-Relational databases and multidimensional models.
-Comprehensive security & access control.

Less appropriate scenarios:
-Non-relational databases
-Low budget
-Tight timeframe

I'd invite anyone reading this far to think hard on his/her goals with BI. Are you trying to build a solid and endurable BI service for your clients or your own organisation? Or do you just need to have some quick visualisation of the data you have to make strategic or operational decisions in a few weeks time?

Implementing a MicrosoftS BI stack takes time, knowledge, and skills, none of these comes cheaply these days. If your answer to my first question is "yes", go ahead and study Microsoft BI a bit more then make your decision on your own. If you see my second question is most relevant to you, go and grab a web-based BI tool such as SiSense, Tableau, Splunk, and so on. Take the free trial option and see if you can test your ideas fast and at a lower cost. Good luck!

Microsoft BI is a no-brainer for departments or enterprises who already work with MS Office or in a Windows environment, since users can easily make connections with actions they already know.

The added functionalities in Excel to connect to data sources, build tables and relationships through PowerPivot makes it a powerful tool that 99% of people already have access to. When linked with SQL Server and Power BI, you have a complete solution for analysing and visualizing data that is easy to use, but at the same time scalable to work with complex DBs and datasets.

It is well suited for organizations that require a scalable environment, rich with features. Windows integrated security and role configurations also make it especially easy to configure advanced security for a large number of users. It may be less necessary/appropriate for projects with simpler needs or organizations running on operating systems other than Windows.

Microsoft BI can digest data from a variety of sources like Google Analytics, mailchimp, Facebook, salesforce etc., which is great from a marketing point of view. Data is changing every minute and for a big organization, getting these updates live is a great feature.

Microsoft BI is best after a bit of training on how to use the program. It is straight forward to use after that and easy to integrate with all your Microsoft programs, and I would recommend it as the next step after Excel because Microsoft BI's capabilities can be very similar to that of Excel.