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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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Popular Features
- Customizable dashboards (138)8.080%
- Drill-down analysis (138)7.272%
- Report sharing and collaboration (134)7.070%
- Formatting capabilities (137)6.464%
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- No setup fee
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- 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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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
Microsoft Power BI Competitors
Microsoft Power BI Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | Asia Pacific, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States |
| Supported Languages | Arabic, 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.
Reviewers rate Javascript API highest, with a score of 9.6.
The most common users of Microsoft Power BI are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews
(26-50 of 140)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
- Using features like Power Query, which is in itself like a tool like Excel, you can clean and preview data before using it for analysis purposes. If you have used Excel in the past, Power Query will, for the most part, be a cakewalk for you.
- The predominant feature one comes to Power BI is the ability to create automated formidable dashboards that everyone refers to before or during meetings to encourage and substantiate decision-making.
- If required, based on specific data points, reports are triggered automatically to certain people as well.
- Off the top of my head, I don't have many areas of improvement to suggest. I have experienced it improving day by day, adding and fixing features.
- I have noticed that if you have data from many sources linked and a lot of data representing figures on the dashboard, it can feel a little bloated in terms of responsiveness. Inline data takes some time to pop up if you hover your mouse over a figure, and changing the data on any table/figure takes time to reflect on the other linked table/figures.
- The earlier they match the functionalities between the online and offline versions, the better. I would like to have a seamless experience irrespective of the platform or environment.
- Very quick and easy to filter down and look [at] granular sets of data.
- Easy to switch between various tabs for quick ad-hoc reporting.
- Easy to read and analyze the charts that we set up.
- Real time, or near real time data, which allows us to make actionable insights easier.
- Since it's a complex system, need a technical team or administrator to manage.
- I don't like being locked out. Make it easier to stay log[ged] in and not fill in password.
- SSO login would be huge! This would save a lot of time and improve security.
May 12, 2021
Reporting Super Program
- Configurable reporting figures that can be set and adjusted to meet your needs.
- Historical data comparisons and progress tracking.
- Ease of access. Being able to access the reports online is awesome.
- Being able to dive into the data and break it down from high levels to small is helpful as well.
- There is a bit of a learning curve to fully use the software.
- It requires a pretty strong data analysis background to be able to use.
- Troubleshooting data issues is not super easy.
- Nice graphic reports
- Sharing reports on the web to be embedded with iFrames
- Friendly interface and simple steps to make a report and publish it on Power BI Service on the cloud
- Easy and simple integration with Microsoft Ecosystem
- Shared web reports (to external users via iFrame) are not really responsive, they can just resize automatically
- The integration with Azure is tricky to achieve some configurations (for example, security settings)
- Power Query is a waste of time and can be replaced by database queries and procedures
May 10, 2021
Bring most out of your data
- Data modeling
- Rich data visualizations
- Great community
- Complex pricing model
- Complex data modeling
- Less intuitive than other BI tools
May 08, 2021
Power BI- More powerful reports and dashboards
- Data from multiple sources can easily be imported and processed using in-built connectors in Power BI.
- Auto ML capabilities are inbuilt helping people create predictive models without an in-depth knowledge of coding and algorithms.
- Reports and dashboards can be accessed on the go via mobile apps.
- Learning to create dashboard on Power BI is a bit intimidating for a new user and takes a long time to learn different functionalities.
- Documentation is not great and links are broken at times.
- No support Mac based devices.
May 04, 2021
Microsoft Power BI - Gets the Job Done
- It's ability to store massive amounts of data allowed it to be a useful resource for multiple teams
- Multiple different charts and graphs were available, making it far more visually stimulating than Salesforce native functionality
- Data pulls are seamless and show up in easy formatting
- A slightly clunky user interface, makes most end users fear building anything themselves
- 3rd party api syncs seem to be a pretty heavy lift to set up
- The overall set up when building a report is intimidating, and some buttons aren't clear, so hovering over all of them to see their labels can be time consuming and annoying
May 02, 2021
Power BI: The change reporting needed
- Data analysis.
- KPI reporting.
- Data interaction.
- Data extraction from different sources.
- Data refreshing/updating.
- Steep learning curve.
- Need for a Microsoft account.
April 30, 2021
The Industry Standard
- Dashboards
- Summarizing Data
- C-Level Ready Reports
- Requires some training
- Not very user friendly on the input side
- Requires developer skills
April 28, 2021
Power BI Saves Analysts Time
- Filters.
- UI design.
- Easy to plug into database.
- Not exactly intuitive for users unfamiliar with BI tools.
- Big learning curve to set up dashboard.
- Adhoc analysis.
- Seamless user experience with the O365 environment.
- Features and capabilities that are best in class.
- Learning curve is greater than other (less-robust) platforms.
April 27, 2021
Easy to use inexpensive analytics tool
- Nice custom visualisations.
- Seamless excel integration.
- Cheaper compared to the other options.
- Regular updates incorporating creativity, innovation & state-of-the-art approaches.
- Power BI has a very bulky user interface.
- Slow performance and time-outs while handling large data sources.
- Custom visuals are not configurable.
April 27, 2021
Empower your data through Power BI!
- It's an excellent tool to integrate tables from different databases into one report.
- The visual indicators are mostly complete and easy to use.
- You can edit/manage/transform your tables to do almost whatever you want.
- The UX is clean and simple, but powerful enough to deliver great results.
- When you get too many tables, it might get a bit slow, it would be great if it could be more performant.
- There aren't as much statistic tools or add-ons as one would want. Now, you can only do descriptive analysis but if you wish to do statistical tests there aren't functions or integrations that help you easily do that.
- Formatting of some elements is a bit limited.
- Sharing a dynamic report is not as smooth as I would like (to do so you need to pay for a license for the visitor or give access to your information to Microsoft, which I legally can't do).
- The integration with R is not as good as I would like, it has many issues with the imports and the versioning of R and its packages.
April 27, 2021
Reporting made easy with Power BI
- It excellently manages the relationship connections between tables.
- It is easy to transform the data using power query.
- Power BI lets you connect to multiple data sources at the same time.
- Using DAX formulas helps you to create new measures using existing fields.
- Power BI could have more charts and visual representations.
- Easier way to manipulate the data.
April 27, 2021
Power BI Review for Construction Data
- Storytelling with data.
- Easy to use.
- Beautiful graphics.
- If you are not familiar with DAX it can be a bit difficult to create measures, but you can easily find solutions.
- It can sometimes take a while to refresh the data.
April 27, 2021
As a marketer I'd pass
- Ability to consume data from multiple sources.
- Both mobile app and Teams connection available for quick views and collaboration.
- Difficult as a marketer to find data or create reports.
- Need additional training options to view capability and how to or where to find data.
- Search bar functionality not intuitive, at least keep it sticky rather than needing to hover over the bottom of a list.
April 27, 2021
Microsoft Power BI - a solid choice for data visualization and a great add to the Microsoft Suite
- Nice dashboarding capabilities.
- Can integrate well with other Microsoft products.
- Calculated fields.
- Connectivity to data sources.
- Some small bugs/constraints on how data visualization components.
- Some components of Power BI dashboards are a bit clunky and outdated.
- Iterating/versioning of dashboards not seamless.
April 27, 2021
Do try PowerBi !
- Visualizations
- Data loading
- Data manipulation
- Can be slow
- Premium/pro licence required to share dashboards
- DAX language required for more complicated queries
April 27, 2021
It's POWERful. It's INTELLIGENT. It's POWER BI.
- Data aggregation
- Data visualization
- Data consolidation
- Initial user interface can be hard to navigate
- Would like to see more suggestive visualization recommendations, similar to how PPT provides design ideas
- More color schemes / options for design
April 27, 2021
Power BI Review
- Convert your numbers into presentable charts.
- Low cost in comparison to other tools in the market.
- In dataset you can use JSON, XML, SQL and Excel files as a data source all on a single platform.
- Wide range of custom visualization available such as graph, map, charts, etc.
- GUI is definitely one of the areas they need to improve, lots of options on the desktop make it confusing.
- Free version can handle only 2GB data. If you want to upload more data you need to purchase the license which costs you $9.99.
- Complex relationship between the table is the problem to handle with Power BI.
April 27, 2021
Power BI great now and positioned well for the future
- Report distribution.
- Ease of setting up data models.
- Constantly improving.
- Dataset Management.
- Confusing Licensing models.
- Multiple programming languages used.
April 26, 2021
Power BI - Top of the Visualization Heap
- Very intuitive to use, particularly if you have a background in Excel and have leveraged Power Pivot.
- Excellent visuals with a wide variety of options.
- Great performance, driven by the same engine used by SSAS Tabular.
- For on-prem users of Power BI Report Server, it would be useful if Desktop included a compatibility level that could be set rather than having to manage desktop installs, particularly with the app-based installation option.
- Formatting options can be uneven between different visuals.
- Formatting for tables based on queries seem to randomly be reformatted to being difficult to read.
April 26, 2021
Microsoft Power BI does the job for analytical reporting and insights into your business
- Easy to use tool
- Great integration
- Friendly interface
- More drag and drop features
April 23, 2021
Game changer for organizing sales data, identifying metrics, insights, and arriving at actionable outcomes
- Data warehousing
- Dynamic data visualisations
- Robust reporting options
- Help Desk / Support
- Can sometimes be slow to load
- Ability to assign tasks
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Visualizations
- Calculated Fields
- Source Data Connectivity
- Data Refresh is not as Fluid and Automatic as I'd like
- There are limitations on visualizations, such as showing month names as labels in a trend line, rolling 12 month year-over year comparison of data. I get month numbers. There are dirty workarounds, but it's not clean, and it's certainly not intuitive.