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Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI

Overview

What is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in…

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Recent Reviews

Power Packed Microsoft Power BI

8 out of 10
October 04, 2023
I used Microsoft Power BI for regular data analysis and report generation.
I use to deal with a lot of financial data and Microsoft Power …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 29 features
  • Customizable dashboards (138)
    8.1
    81%
  • Drill-down analysis (138)
    7.3
    73%
  • Report sharing and collaboration (134)
    7.0
    70%
  • Formatting capabilities (137)
    6.5
    65%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://powerbi.microsoft.com/en…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $10 per month per user
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Product Demos

Microsoft Power BI Guided Tour

powerbi.microsoft.com
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.3
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

7.1
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

7.8
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

7.6
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.2
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

7.9
Avg 8.0

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

8.4
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is Microsoft Power BI?

Power BI: Comprehensive Business Intelligence Platform


Capabilities:

  • Discover Insights with AI: Utilizes advanced data-analysis tools, AI features, and a report-creation tool to transform complex data into accessible visuals, making it easier to uncover valuable insights.

  • Consolidate Data with OneLake: Integrates datasets from diverse sources into OneLake, creating a centralized, reliable source of truth for data. This integration reduces data duplication and simplifies analysis.

  • Drive Decision-Making: Infuse actionable insights into everyday applications like Microsoft 365, enhancing decision-making processes across the organization.

  • Empower Data Teams with Microsoft Fabric: Revolutionizes organization's data management and usage by incorporating Microsoft Fabric into the Power BI experience.


Key Differentiators:

  • Scalability: Power BI offers exceptional scalability, capable of transforming petabytes of data and supporting thousands of users without compromising performance.

  • Integration with Microsoft Ecosystem: Seamlessly embed and share insights across Microsoft services like Teams, PowerPoint, Excel, and the Power Platform, ensuring coherent and unified data handling.

  • Advanced AI Capabilities: Features AI tools that automatically find patterns, generate reports, and provide insights, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.

  • Robust Data Governance: Ensures data security and compliance with Microsoft's comprehensive governance and protection measures.


Copilot in Power BI:

  • Efficient Report Generation: Generates reports rapidly using conversational language. Copilot in Power BI enables quick creation of DAX calculations, summaries, and tailored reports.


Integration with Microsoft Fabric:

  • Enhanced Accessibility: Allows interaction with reports and data across Microsoft Fabric workloads, even for users without paid licenses.

  • OneLake Data Hub: Facilitates the connection and curation of data from varied sources, promoting efficient data engineering.


Power BI PRO:

  • Self-Service Analytics: License individuals for self-service analytics, enabling them to publish and share reports, fostering a culture of self-service BI.


Free Account Options:

  • Power BI Desktop & Free Trial: Offers a free app for data connection, modeling, and visualization, along with an easy-to-use report canvas.

  • Comprehensive Training: Access step-by-step Microsoft training courses to fully leverage Power BI capabilities.


Key Benefits:


  • Unified Data Management: Connect disparate data sources to establish a governed, unified source of truth.

  • Empower All Users: Ensures accessibility and ease of use for everyone, supported by free training resources and numerous accessibility features.

  • Immediate Start: Quickly begin with report creation, AI-generated reports, and a wide range of templates.

  • Customer Engagement: Enhance user engagement in apps by embedding Power BI reports.



Microsoft Power BI Features

BI Platform Features

  • Supported: Administration via Windows App
  • Supported: Administration via Web Interface
  • Supported: Live Connection to External Data
  • Supported: Snapshot of External Data
  • Supported: In-memory data model
  • Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
  • Supported: ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
  • Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
  • Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer
  • Supported: ETL Capability

Supported Data Sources Features

  • Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
  • Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
  • Supported: Oracle
  • Supported: MS SQL Server
  • Supported: IBM DB2
  • Supported: Postgres
  • Supported: MySQL
  • Supported: ODBC
  • Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
  • Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
  • Supported: EMC Greenplum
  • Supported: IBM Netezza
  • Supported: HP Vertica
  • Supported: ParAccel
  • Supported: SAP Hana
  • Supported: Teradata
  • Supported: Sage 500
  • Supported: Salesforce
  • Supported: SAP
  • Supported: Google Analytics

BI Standard Reporting Features

  • Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
  • Supported: Customizable dashboards
  • Supported: Report Formatting Templates

Ad-hoc Reporting Features

  • Supported: Drill-down analysis
  • Supported: Formatting capabilities
  • Supported: Predictive modeling
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
  • Supported: Report sharing and collaboration

Report Output and Scheduling Features

  • Supported: Publish to Web
  • Supported: Publish to PDF
  • Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
  • Supported: Report Versioning
  • Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling
  • Supported: Delivery to Remote Servers

Data Discovery and Visualization Features

  • Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
  • Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
  • Supported: Predictive Analytics
  • Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
  • Supported: Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages

Access Control and Security Features

  • Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
  • Supported: Role-Based Security Model
  • Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
  • Supported: Report-Level Access Control
  • Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
  • Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
  • Supported: Single Sign-On (SSO)

Mobile Capabilities Features

  • Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
  • Supported: Mobile Application
  • Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding Features

  • Supported: REST API
  • Supported: Javascript API
  • Supported: Java API
  • Supported: Themeable User Interface (UI)

Microsoft Power BI Screenshots

Screenshot of Microsoft Power BI - Turns insights into impact for business usersScreenshot of Power BI integrates easily with Microsoft 365Screenshot of Microsoft Power BI - AI-Powered CapabilitiesScreenshot of Microsoft Power BI - Copilot can be used to create reportsScreenshot of Microsoft Power BI - Data HubScreenshot of Microsoft Power BI - Scales as organizational needs growScreenshot of Microsoft Power BI - Data Governance

Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Microsoft Power BI Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mobile Web
Supported CountriesAsia Pacific, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States
Supported LanguagesArabic, Basque - Basque, Bulgarian - Български, Catalan - català, Chinese (Simplified) - 中文(简体), Chinese (Traditional) - 中文(繁體), Croatian - hrvatski, Czech - čeština, Danish - dansk, Dutch - Nederlands, English - English, Estonian - eesti, Finnish - suomi, French - français, Galician - galego, German - Deutsch, Greek - Ελληνικά, Hebrew, Hindi - हिंदी, Hungarian - magyar, Indonesian - Bahasa Indonesia, Italian - italiano, Japanese - 日本語, Kazakh - Қазақ, Korean - 한국어, Latvian - latviešu, Lithuanian - lietuvių, Malay - Bahasa Melayu, Norwegian (Bokmål) - norsk (bokmål), Polish - Polski, Portuguese (Brazil) - Português, Portuguese (Portugal) - português, Romanian - română, Russian - Русский, Serbian (Cyrillic) - српски, Serbian (Latin) - srpski, Slovak - slovenčina, Slovenian - slovenski, Spanish - español, Swedish - svenska, Thai - ไทย, Turkish - Türkçe, Ukrainian - українська, Vietnamese - Tiếng Việt

Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.

Microsoft Power BI starts at $10.

Tableau Cloud, Looker, and Domo are common alternatives for Microsoft Power BI.

Reviewers rate Javascript API highest, with a score of 9.5.

The most common users of Microsoft Power BI are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(1795)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Mohamed Adil Shaikh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Power BI is a great tool for Visualization and reporting.
We basically use this tool as a means of analyzing the maintenance data base in SAP.
Because of this tool we can easily be able to find out the insights and bottle necks in the SAP Data.
With Certain filters and query this dashboard can be easily shared to the higher management and can be able to find out where to improve by quickly analyzing the data.
  • Visualization
  • Charts
  • Dynamic Charts
  • Queries and filters
  • Dashboard should be easily sharable
  • Online Editing should be possible without downloading the app.
For finding insights of huge data sets, where automatic cleaning and processing of data is required before creating charts and dashboards, there the software is well suited.
Where data keeps uploading on a regular basis and it needs to be shared with a team and all the team members are involved in updating the datasets and charts, so it becomes difficult to manage.
BI Platform
N/A
N/A
Supported Data Sources
N/A
N/A
BI Standard Reporting (3)
76.66666666666667%
7.7
Pixel Perfect reports
60%
6.0
Customizable dashboards
100%
10.0
Report Formatting Templates
70%
7.0
Ad-hoc Reporting (4)
65%
6.5
Drill-down analysis
80%
8.0
Formatting capabilities
60%
6.0
Integration with R or other statistical packages
60%
6.0
Report sharing and collaboration
60%
6.0
Report Output and Scheduling (5)
62%
6.2
Publish to Web
80%
8.0
Publish to PDF
90%
9.0
Report Versioning
60%
6.0
Report Delivery Scheduling
80%
8.0
Delivery to Remote Servers
N/A
N/A
Data Discovery and Visualization (2)
85%
8.5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
80%
8.0
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
90%
9.0
Access Control and Security (1)
90%
9.0
Single Sign-On (SSO)
90%
9.0
Mobile Capabilities (3)
66.66666666666667%
6.7
Responsive Design for Web Access
80%
8.0
Mobile Application
60%
6.0
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
60%
6.0
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding (5)
16%
1.6
REST API
N/A
N/A
Javascript API
N/A
N/A
iFrames
N/A
N/A
Java API
N/A
N/A
Themeable User Interface (UI)
80%
8.0
  • 20% of ROI can be expected if used in a proper manner
For Visualization and Reporting Power BI is way ahead of MS Excel, not only it has the functionality of MS Excel for cleaning and processing of data in the advance Query tab but also the add-on of more eye appealing and customizable Visualizations.
MS Excel is more focused on data analyzing and handling whereas Power BI is more focused on Visualization and Dashboards.
1000
Basically team represents several business functions like Finance, Operations, Maintenance. In the finance sector, Power BI plays a pivotal role in financial analysis, budgeting, and forecasting. Finance teams utilize its capabilities to create comprehensive reports, monitor key financial metrics, and identify potential areas for cost optimization.Operations and supply chain management benefit from Power BI by visualizing production data, inventory levels, and supply chain efficiency. This empowers operations teams to enhance processes, manage inventory more effectively, and streamline logistics.
10
Data analysts play a central role in creating and managing Power BI reports and dashboards. They possess skills in data modeling, visualization, and analysis, and are responsible for transforming raw data into meaningful insights along with that Individuals skilled in data visualization design are essential to create compelling and effective dashboards. They understand best practices in visual communication, color theory, and layout design to present data in an understandable and engaging manner.
  • Predictive Analytics: We could utilize Power BI's machine learning capabilities to develop predictive models. This would allow us to forecast trends, anticipate customer behavior, and make proactive decisions based on data-driven insights
  • Real-time Monitoring: Power BI's real-time data streaming feature could enable us to monitor critical metrics and KPIs in real time. This would facilitate quicker responses to emerging trends or issues, ensuring timely adjustments to our strategies.
  • Supply Chain Optimization: We could use Power BI to optimize our supply chain by analyzing data related to inventory levels, demand patterns, and supplier performance. This could lead to improved inventory management and cost savings.
  • Production Monitoring and Reporting: Power BI enables real-time monitoring of production data from oil rigs and wells. Operators can visualize production rates, downtime, and equipment performance, allowing them to identify issues promptly and optimize production processes.
  • Maintenance and Asset Management: Power BI facilitates predictive maintenance by analyzing equipment sensor data. Maintenance teams can anticipate equipment failures, schedule preventive maintenance, and minimize downtime, ensuring efficient asset management.
  • Oil and gas organizations have been leveraging Microsoft Power BI in unexpected and innovative ways to address complex challenges and drive operational improvements. Some examples include:
  • Drilling Optimization: Using Power BI's real-time data capabilities, companies have developed dashboards that monitor drilling operations in real time. They track drilling parameters, equipment performance, and geological data to optimize drilling efficiency, reduce downtime, and enhance wellbore placement accuracy.
  • Predictive Maintenance for Offshore Platforms: Power BI has been utilized to analyze sensor data from offshore platforms to predict equipment failures. By applying machine learning algorithms to historical data, companies can proactively schedule maintenance, reducing costly downtime and improving platform safety.
Not Sure
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
Integrating Microsoft Power BI with other systems is essential to ensure data integrity, streamline processes, and create a seamless flow of information. One significant use case involves integrating Power BI with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems:

CRM Integration:
Power BI can be integrated with CRM systems like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, or other industry-specific CRM platforms. This integration enhances decision-making by providing comprehensive insights into customer interactions, sales performance, and market trends.
I'll define clear objectives for implementing a tool like Power BI. Determine what specific goals you aim to achieve, whether it's improving data visualization, enhancing decision-making, or optimizing a particular business process and Involve representatives from different departments and teams in the evaluation process. This ensures that the tool meets the needs of various stakeholders and can be effectively utilized across the organization.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have designed an additional layer over Atlassian JIRA and enhanced significantly analytical drilldowns in a SW development projects, software maintenance and end user support. We have also developed custom API to JIRA to efficiently gather JIRA data and process and present them in Power BI dashboards. The management was first skeptical, since the JIRA service desk team already had some reports done in the native JIRA environment. However we have convinced them that the connection of Power BI and JIRA logs makes a sense. Today it is used to visualize flow, detect anomalies (too many cycles, overused programmer resources etc.) in a perfect visual form.
  • Quick and easy dashboard deployment
  • Easy integration to existing system (both API and raw data imports were used)
  • Mobile platform (tablets) support
  • I can not think of any. Until now, all works well!
I would recommend this solution (and we have started to use it) since it is cheap. Even our developer started to use it in a cloud version before the project officially started. For a few bucks per month. So there is a really low entry barrier. Basically it will fit in a situation where you need a short development time. Not very well suited for big data analysis in production system though.
We use in the overlapping areas as data preparation and advanced analytics, monitoring and allerting also other tools as IBM ThingWorx (for the IoT tasks), Splunk (production and banking), SAP Lumira and SAP HANA, SAP Designer (production) and also specialized process mining tools as e.g. Minit (Gradient). Power BI can be used to present data gathered and analyzed in the other big data analytical systems, since the client already owns it and some of the analytical tools offer way too much complexity, that we can shield with prepared Power BI management reports.
BI Platform
N/A
N/A
Supported Data Sources
N/A
N/A
BI Standard Reporting (3)
90%
9.0
Pixel Perfect reports
90%
9.0
Customizable dashboards
90%
9.0
Report Formatting Templates
90%
9.0
Ad-hoc Reporting (4)
47.5%
4.8
Drill-down analysis
100%
10.0
Formatting capabilities
90%
9.0
Integration with R or other statistical packages
N/A
N/A
Report sharing and collaboration
N/A
N/A
Report Output and Scheduling (5)
20%
2.0
Publish to Web
100%
10.0
Publish to PDF
N/A
N/A
Report Versioning
N/A
N/A
Report Delivery Scheduling
N/A
N/A
Delivery to Remote Servers
N/A
N/A
Data Discovery and Visualization (3)
33.333333333333336%
3.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
N/A
N/A
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
N/A
N/A
Predictive Analytics
100%
10.0
Access Control and Security (4)
N/A
N/A
Multi-User Support (named login)
N/A
N/A
Role-Based Security Model
N/A
N/A
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
N/A
N/A
Single Sign-On (SSO)
N/A
N/A
Mobile Capabilities (3)
66.66666666666667%
6.7
Responsive Design for Web Access
100%
10.0
Mobile Application
N/A
N/A
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
100%
10.0
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding (6)
33.333333333333336%
3.3
REST API
100%
10.0
Javascript API
100%
10.0
iFrames
N/A
N/A
Java API
N/A
N/A
Themeable User Interface (UI)
N/A
N/A
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
N/A
N/A
3
Data scientist and IT analyst
Business consultant / architect
2
We work in a small team, enlarged when needed by e.g. a programmer, integration specialist, UX designer etc. But the core team is 2-3 people.
  • Sales presentation - to convince the client about the value of data they have and do not use to get insigt. It is easy to create a model of a future reporting / allerting / monitoring system on prepared data and present all potential features on real life data (e.g. anonymized, lightly changed, to protect data privacy)
  • Visualize flows, be it human processes or e.g. movement of product among waypoints in a factory paintshop
  • Drill down analysis - by clicking the active report element, go to detailed statistics or other more detailed graph. Very useful and interactive
  • Simulation of real-time working allerting solution options
  • A custom programmed Power BI flow discovery application, replacing funcitons of specialized process mining tools.
Yes
Our client evaluated several platforms: the company wanted to decide among three platforms, Tableau (not very good for the specified purpose), SAS Visual Analytics on Viya and MS Power BI. Finally the decision was made to go for implement MS Power BI reporting platform powered by PowerBI Server (paid), within the Microsoft Office 365
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Analyst Reports
Part of the selection process was to simulate future reports for the whole branch network on each platform, old SAS VA, Tableau and MS Power BI.
The decision was clearly in favor of Power BI. A significant fact is an extensive experience of about tens of analysts wit MS Excel, which in the basic mode is very similar, of course I am not talking about DAX scripting, which requires more advanced training.
I would probably go the same way, the price was not the most decsive point, the task was to get a "familiar, easy to use product" that was fulfilled by MS Power BI. Unfortunately the SAS on Viya was not available as a trial solution, so a full comparison was not possible. Also, the MS Power BI comprises nowadays manyu addons and the user community is wide, unlike for SAS.
December 13, 2017

Power BI-- Getting There

Galen Mosier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Power BI to create and share dashboards for users and teams in various departments to get a better understanding of the success of their processes. It's also used to track the progress of department and individual performance goals.
  • Because of a strong relationship between Power BI and Excel, Excel power users should find that the Power BI learning curve isn't too steep. Anyone familiar with Power Query, in particular, will find Power BI to be happily similar in many ways.
  • It's very easy to import and massage data from a wide variety of sources. The interface allows for some powerful data cleaning and wrangling without the need to learn the underlying M language.
  • Microsoft appears to be committed to Power BI; improvements and new functionality are added frequently.
  • Because it's fairly new to the party, there is a lot of functionality more mature products like Tableau and QlikView have that Power BI doesn't (yet).
  • While inexpensive enough, I'm not crazy about the pricing model of cost-free development while requiring individual end-users to purchase licenses.
Power BI is well suited to anyone with a deep understanding of Excel. I also recommend it to anyone who doesn't already know and use a similar tool like Tableau or QlikView. The amount of time from knowing nothing to building a reasonably functional dashboard is shorter with Power BI than the other products, in my opinion (having used all three). It can also be also a good introduction to BI tools in general since they all do more or less the same things, but sometimes the complexities of a process can obscure the bigger picture. I feel like I understand QlikView better after learning Power BI than I did after learning only QlikView.
As mentioned earlier, Power BI is not as mature as QlikView or Tableau and, as a result, is more limited in the kinds of things it's capable of. That said, it's still highly capable of fulfilling most typical BI dashboard requirements. We chose Power BI partly because of a very specific and unusual set of circumstances that wouldn't apply to anyone else, and partly because we could begin developing dashboards without having to go through the usual (lengthy) process of waiting for budget approval. Since developers can develop at no cost, we were able to begin creating dashboards while the process of getting funding for the end-users was working its way through the system.
BI Platform
N/A
N/A
Supported Data Sources
N/A
N/A
BI Standard Reporting (3)
46.66666666666667%
4.7
Pixel Perfect reports
60%
6.0
Customizable dashboards
80%
8.0
Report Formatting Templates
N/A
N/A
Ad-hoc Reporting (4)
80%
8.0
Drill-down analysis
80%
8.0
Formatting capabilities
70%
7.0
Integration with R or other statistical packages
90%
9.0
Report sharing and collaboration
80%
8.0
Report Output and Scheduling (5)
66%
6.6
Publish to Web
70%
7.0
Publish to PDF
80%
8.0
Report Versioning
60%
6.0
Report Delivery Scheduling
60%
6.0
Delivery to Remote Servers
60%
6.0
Data Discovery and Visualization (3)
73.33333333333333%
7.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
70%
7.0
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
80%
8.0
Predictive Analytics
70%
7.0
Access Control and Security (4)
67.5%
6.8
Multi-User Support (named login)
80%
8.0
Role-Based Security Model
60%
6.0
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
60%
6.0
Single Sign-On (SSO)
70%
7.0
Mobile Capabilities (3)
70%
7.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
70%
7.0
Mobile Application
70%
7.0
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
70%
7.0
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding (6)
45%
4.5
REST API
60%
6.0
Javascript API
70%
7.0
iFrames
N/A
N/A
Java API
60%
6.0
Themeable User Interface (UI)
80%
8.0
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
N/A
N/A
Not Sure
jim paroly | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Power BI is a very good tool to create quick reports with beautiful visualizations and a great tool to research your data visually. I think that seeing your data in a visual way can help you see things you may miss with a standard report. I use it to track my projects to compare costs and revenues.
  • Power BI allows you to show or look at your data in different types of visualizations easily and quickly.
  • It is light-weight with great selection of visualization tools (with many add-ons available for extra types of visualization).
  • You can create reports using the easy to use and elegant looking dashboard which would be familiar to Excel users.
  • The data you analyze can come from single or multiple data sources, with a huge selection of data source types.
  • The reports and graphs you create can be easily customized to suit your needs or taste.
  • New features are being added rapidly (which can be a con for some as it can result in having to re-learn to use some of the operations).
  • May be a little hard at first for users with no Excel (or competing products) [experience].
  • Can be slow with large amounts of data.
  • Office 365 version of Power BI is not as easy to use as the desktop version.
  • Exporting and integration with other products can be improved.
I think that anyone who works with data (costs, customer, advertising, etc) can benefit from seeing their data visually. Power BI has various types of visualization options that allow you to look at your data in ways a standard report just can't and you WILL see information you've missed before. It may not be best for users with very large amounts of data.
BI Platform
N/A
N/A
Supported Data Sources
N/A
N/A
BI Standard Reporting (3)
86.66666666666666%
8.7
Pixel Perfect reports
80%
8.0
Customizable dashboards
90%
9.0
Report Formatting Templates
90%
9.0
Ad-hoc Reporting (4)
60%
6.0
Drill-down analysis
70%
7.0
Formatting capabilities
80%
8.0
Integration with R or other statistical packages
N/A
N/A
Report sharing and collaboration
90%
9.0
Report Output and Scheduling (4)
20%
2.0
Publish to Web
80%
8.0
Publish to PDF
N/A
N/A
Report Versioning
N/A
N/A
Report Delivery Scheduling
N/A
N/A
Data Discovery and Visualization (3)
33.333333333333336%
3.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
100%
10.0
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
N/A
N/A
Predictive Analytics
N/A
N/A
Access Control and Security (3)
N/A
N/A
Multi-User Support (named login)
N/A
N/A
Role-Based Security Model
N/A
N/A
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
N/A
N/A
Mobile Capabilities (3)
53.33333333333333%
5.3
Responsive Design for Web Access
80%
8.0
Mobile Application
N/A
N/A
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
80%
8.0
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
N/A
N/A
  • I'm using the free version, so the only investment was the time spent to learn how to use the product (which as an Excel user, was very short).
  • I use Excel to store every single bit of information about all the projects I do, and being able to see them visualized helped me see some redundant steps I was taking.
  • No negative impact at all for me.
  • Excel
Microsoft's Power BI is what Excel graphing and pivoting should have been like. Power BI has much better ways to look at your data visually than you can with Excel's own tools. You can select from many built-in graph types or you can use the growing number of add-ons to get even more ways to visualize your data. Customizing reports/graphs is also much easier in Power BI.
1
budget planning ad campaign planning
1
anyone with Excel knowledge will be at home with Power BI. An understanding of pivoting is recommended.
  • Plan project budget based on previous projects
  • Assess AdWord campaign success
  • Compare expenses against income based on similar past projects
  • If and when my business will grow, I will be using the BI collaboration features to track all employee projects
I find it helpful and easy to use
Yes
it replaced Excel as it has much better visualization and publishing options.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Third-party Reviews
features. I was looking for a product that expands on Excel capabilities.
I am happy with how and what I have selected. I could have read more reviews.
  • Selecting visualization type
  • Connecting to data sources
Yes, but I don't use it
i have never tried it.
Easy to use
Modern interface that will be familiar to Office users
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