Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I think the entry point for Power BI is good, especially for businesses already joined to Microsoft in an Office 365 environment. It typically plays nice with any source data, and it has some very powerful display options. My stakeholders really like what we're doing with it.

I'm not a fan of Microsoft Support in general. I have better luck searching forums and talking to 3rd party integrators. Microsoft's self-help is usually way too generic for my needs.

Power BI is well suited to anyone with a deep understanding of Excel and Excel Pivots. I also recommend it to anyone who doesn't already know and use similar tools. It is quite quick in terms of the amount of time from knowing nothing to building a reasonably functional dashboard is shorter with Power BI than the other products. It can also be also a good introduction to BI tools in general as it can help to reduce the complexities of a process and help to see the bigger picture.

Microsoft Power BI has been well suited in 3 main areas for us. First, it does really well at organizing disparate data and combining it all together. The second thing it does well is that it has the capability to modify or transform your data based on logic. Finally, the out of the box visuals cover pretty much everything you need for reporting.

Microsoft Power BI is easy to learn and use. With a little effort, you can integrate a lot of different data sources and, very importantly, you don't need to have a big infrastructure, thanks to Microsoft Cloud. It is also well suited for personal use, to extend Excel functionalities and analyze big amount of data.

Microsoft Power BI works well with most of the database formats and where the requirement is to visualize the data with multiple aspects. It gives the ability to get the maximum of the data by doing some analytics and answering some questions as well.

Within the HR department we receive report requests from other departments on a regular basis. We have used Power BI to create a process where the reports are automatically delivered to our clients. This saves a lot of time for both of us.
Like I mentioned before, there is a learning curve to understanding this tool. It needs practice. Microsoft organizes free in house training for Power BI. Anyone can sign up and learn. The training materials are very useful and the staff is very knowledgeable and polite. The information can be obtained within the tool updates.

Power BI is well suited for first-time users of BI software who like the Microsoft look and feel. It’s relatively easy to make work for small projects. The software is not suited for advanced analytics projects where the user cares about speed and accuracy of real-time model performance.

Best Suited: Visualization of data that is not easily accessible through Excel, data which are not yet treated and not refined. Microsoft Power BI makes it easier to showcase this data. Power BI is best used to display analytical information for untreated data, it has visuals that do statistical analysis and can be used with Artificial Intelligence to obtain more valuable information from different datasources.

Less Appropriate: Small data sources, which do not require a second software to display information in a visual way. Using/buying Power BI for small data sources is overkill and is going to generate unnecessary expenditures.

It actually depends on the size of the organization and person who will work with Power BI. If you have a big organization, need many reports and need dashboard visualization. Choose it. But be sure the user has good knowledge on Excel, database connections and DAX. If you are a small business you may want to stay on Excel. In any case you can try.

Microsoft Power BI works well if you are able to connect to your data sources as an automated data feed. It is more challenging to use if you have to manually import your data sources every time you want refreshed data.

Well suited for exploratory analysis and visualization. Less suited to created advanced predictive modeling and fast high volume data.

Power BI is great for reporting of any type. The dashboards I create for my executive team are crisp and easy to understand. I often get complements on it, and suggestions on what other reports or data could benefit from Power BI. Power BI is still dependent on data sources, so if my data source connections break, then the report is no good. This isn't something that you can create and forget. It needs eyes on it to ensure the data is correct.

Microsoft Power BI is well suited to the following scenarios:

• Where a lot of data is available and, if processed, and displayed well, it will benefit efficiency and productivity across the organisation.
• Where the results of processed data are used to convince clients of completed work.

Microsoft Power BI is not well suited to the following scenarios:

• Where small organisations need to display their data for internal use, using a self-administered solution.

Well suited for organizations that have a lot of client data. It doesn't necessarily mean you have a lot of clients, but rather that you've collected a large set of data-points that you can analyze, cross-compare, and report on and need higher functions than Excel. It would also be better-suited for organizations that have someone (preferably in-house) who can import & process that data into meaningful reports for other teams to use and build off of.

Less appropriate for smaller organizations that don't have someone in-house or don't have the strong ability to learn how to maximize on the abilities of this tool set. It requires knowledge of interacting with databases and someone who understands how to analyze and interpret business intelligence data. Also not very appropriate for organizations that don't collect much data on their clients, even if they have many clients.

The recommendation for a company would be that with this free/low-cost tool for desktop it can help a lot in making decisions and thereby get a result that you can visualize if your company is on the right path. The user will also get some more creativity about the creation of the panels.

The fact that we don't have to use Excel to create awesome visual charts makes this a complete time-saver. Instead of spending hours and hours updating spreadsheets, Power BI integrates with other programs we use in the organization to pull the raw data automatically, and it looks awesome as well.

PowerBI is great for scenarios where you have raw data and quickly want to get insight into the trends within that data. If you're a small company or working on a small team that will consume this data you can move quite quickly and have everyone on the same page.

I wouldn't recommend using this to share data across a larger organization unless price isn't an issue. It can become expensive when you're talking 50+ users.

This is probably my favorite BI platform I have used to date. It feels a bit younger though, missing some features other platforms have. However, it makes up for this with its low price point for small businesses and great feature set that allows easy elimination of bugs and errors in your dashboards through to the ability to layer visuals on top of each other to get around things like limited numbers of Axis in certain visuals.

There are a few things you have to tweak constantly, tucked away in dropdown menus, that could be much more intuitive actions by clicking on components in visuals, like changing a title, axis name, etc. But the foundations are solid.

Just like Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI has many types of graphs and charts, but when it comes to creating a tableau of information, the data can be transformed into maps and gauges. There is even a KPI visualization and one called R visualization. Of course, the scenario in which the user has advanced experience in Microsoft Excel is the best scenario—Power BI makes data analysis extremely easy for them. And more, you can see the raw data behind the visualization opening Excel.

We love the Power BI integration, so we have seen it built out for specific integrations with specific other software, like Procore, successfully, with little to no effort required by the end user. We feel that if you have data that you would like to dig through and present to a large group in a meaningful way, Power BI is for you.

Quick visual representation of datasets is the strong point here when working with reasonable sized files.
Large dataset files are problematic in quickly giving that representation due to application limitations.
Internal operations being guided by the dashboards is a well suited scenario, but as is the case when working in a collaborative environment, external users will lack your functionality that you have internally.

I would recommend this based on the free use of Power BI desktop for personal usage, practice in data analytics and understanding of data structure. It can help a business in operating its daily business or business critical decision also allows users to have a creative aspect in terms of design and structuring of dashboards.

For generating value out of data, the dashboards are very intuitive and showcases a great volume of data. Very easy to make decisions out of it. Also, report generation and sharing has become very easy which makes it easier for the top management. Production reports are generated daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.

Power BI is great for power Excel users and what I call “data archeologists” or people who dig up old data and clean it up for modern usage. It strings many files together and lets you customize the connections and format of the data. It does not work well with large data set or pull data from large databases, you will find it timing out unless you limit the data set first with a SQL View or Tabular Model before going after it. Also, large data sets take forever to refresh and update, so if you have a lot if iterations, you will spend a lot of time going out for coffee while the data reloads. Other BI tools allow you to localize the data with the first load (Qlik QVD’s) so you can refresh quicker. Comparatively, a refresh of SQL data on Power BI took 45 minutes, the exact same data set would refresh in 30 seconds using Qlik Sense.

Best case: design dashboards with queries/data sources and then update them whenever you need. Live connection is also possible (depends how fast is the connection/back-end data). It is the best for data exploration and visualization.

Not so appropriate: when you need to do tons of calculations with back-end data or clean it in advance, other program like Alteryx would be more appropriate. Power BI is more for data visualization.