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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
(51-75 of 140)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
- Load large volumes of data quickly and efficiently.
- Great visualizations to provide insights into your data.
- Table view provides quick at a glance to trouble shoot issues with data.
- Sharing and publishing can be done in minutes.
- Overlay objects or being able to insert an object into another object.
- Make it easier so different groups of people have access to different tabs.
- Improve connections to data source when accessing via Sharepoint.
April 13, 2021
Microsoft Power BI, a natural choice for modern dashboards for organizations leveraging existing Microsoft technologies
- Dashboards
- Step-based data preparation
- Metrics
- Calculated fields
- Widgets
- Responsive design
- What-if functionality
April 07, 2021
Powerful Power BI
- Ease of pulling data which was otherwise a tedious job earlier.
- Best possible screen presentation in terms of charts and dashboards.
- Connect to other line of business applications like SAP.
- Ease of usage.
- Excel friendly formula and transforming the data.
- It does not show errors as precise as it should, most of the time the errors while loading data are vague.
- Takes a lot of time if you have lengthy formulas for calculations.
- Power BI file itself is a very heavy one, has huge size.
- Has version compatibility issues.
April 06, 2021
Making numbers beautiful!
- The ability to provide consistent and standard reporting
- The ability to incorporate multiple data sources into a single source.
- The analytics within Power BI are incredibly powerful
- More options for external sharing of dashboards would be great.
- Steep learning curve depending on your background.
- Ability to connect to many different data sources
- Ease of access (basic version is free)
- Integration with office modules
- Cloud based (Azure) architecture
- Confusing licensing for Pro and Premium
- Steep learning curve
- Too many features are hard to find
March 10, 2020
Microsoft Power BI - The good is getting better
- Data organization.
- Ease of data conversion.
- The relational database only allows one true join so you have to get creative.
- I want more positional controls.
February 18, 2020
Using Power BI for reporting dashboards
- Allowing various datatypes/sources
- Simple and intuitive UI
- Importing data sources: Very intuitive way to import data, with pop-up wizards to guide the process.
- Creating charts and graphs: It is possible to create charts and graphs just by dragging data fields, no programming required.
- Power BI online is still very limited and also requires that every user has a pro license to see published dashboards.
- If you need to make advanced changes to the imported data, it is required to learn the M-Query, which is a Power BI programming language.
December 30, 2019
Power BI: powerful and easy tool to build complex data model
- Create data models.
- Use dax language.
- Manage production and test environments.
- Build and share model incrementally.
December 09, 2019
Simplified metrics using Power BI
- Saves time as regular reports do not need to be created every time.
- The tool has several grafts and charts that can be created by the click of a button.
- It is easy to analyze data by dwelling deeper in each data set.
- Can be interfaced with several systems.
- The system is useful in data analytics but there is a learning curve.
- It is difficult to understand the linking of datasets while organizing data in the beginning.
- You need to work with an IT person to interface Power BI with existing systems.
- While the tool runs the required metrics, it does not tell a story to connect all the metrics. Human intervention is required in this phase.
December 09, 2019
Decent, but far from awesome
- Integration with other Microsoft products.
- Easy to use interface.
- Calculations are easier than most other BI tools.
- Functionality is limited.
- Is clunky to use with R.
- Graphics are not top of the line.
November 19, 2019
Microsoft Power BI - Easy Analytics
- Drill down to lower-level data
- Visualize performance trends
- Ability to join data from different sources
- Improve geographic map visuals
- Need SQL query editor
- Write custom python code
November 15, 2019
Nice dashboards and easy to adapt when you know Excel.
- It has a free version offered with Microsoft Office 365. So businesses with this type of license can enjoy it free.
- Good dashboards, auto calculation and database connection capabilities.
- Easy to learn and use when you have familiarity with Excel. You can reach free training material on many platforms.
- Well integrated with other Microsoft programs (Excel, Access)
- Expensive if you want on premise version. Choose the best fitting license.
- There are some functionalities that require detailed learning. You need to have good experience with Excel, database connections, DAX.
- Data quality matters. If you have uncleaned data, then your work on Power BI can be frustrating as it is poor on providing suggestions.
- You may encounter with performance issues when your data is big.
September 26, 2019
Beautiful Reports and Useful Data, but configuration is not easy!
- Engaging dashboard displays with drag and drop modules to convey data in a meaningful ways.
- Familiar Microsoft "Ribbon" type interface that creates an integral feel with the rest of the Microsoft suite of products.
- Built-in mobile optimization window and associated Mobile applications that allow viewing from any location connected to the server.
- Initial creation of reports, even from processed data sets is not simple.
- The on-premises reporting (crucial for a defense industry company) is extremely expensive, as it is only included in the Power BI Premium package.
- User training is usually required to ensure that full functionality of the dashboards and their built in features are utilized.
September 25, 2019
Power BI - Excel on Steroids and So Much More
- Beautiful graphical models of your data
- Fast processing whether you're working with local data or pulling it from your database
- Very easy to share reports within your organization
- Surprisingly fairly easy to learn
- It is such a powerful system that it can come across as intimidating for some without some Excel knowledge
- I'm not a database analyst or administrator, so calling the data in can be difficult (not necessary the fault of the software, but something that could be difficult for teams without someone with database knowledge)
- It can come across as confusing, when there is both a local Power BI and online Power BI components. They don't necessarily do the same functions. You'll definitely want to know how to use the online version as this is how you'll publish and share the results of your findings, but the local one has a lot of capabilities that don't appear to be directly available in the online version (and if so, it's not immediately apparent).
September 20, 2019
Easy and simple BI tool that can perform complex operations.
- Easy to use.
- Well integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem
- Share with anyone.
- Bit pricey
- Getting used to it and learning might be long for someone new to all the options.
September 18, 2019
Microsoft Power BI: good free tool for analysis
- Cost effective graphing and reports
- Can create personal dashboards
- Can export to Excel
- Slicer tools for data filtering
- Better built-in functions/formulas. Some are too limited.
- UI is a little bulky and can be slow to load.
- Data retrieval/mining
- Data presentation/visuals
- customization
- Ease of use - this tool could be much more intuitive in its design
September 15, 2019
King of Self Service Business Intelligence
- Microsoft Power BI is the best value for money, self-service business intelligence tool available in the market. It is intuitive to use and comes with a library of data connectors.
- It has fantastic data visualization capabilities and simplified user interface.
- We store most of our data on the Azure data lake and Power BI works seamlessly with it.
- Most of our users prefer the desktop version compared to the web tool. Microsoft should put efforts into making the web tool robust and easy to use.
- The refresh cycles are less if you opt for the free version. We bought an enterprise edition to get over this.
- Free versions have less storage and are slower.
September 15, 2019
Really Great!
- Correlation.
- Presentation.
- Visualization.
- Dashboard customization.
- Sharing.
- Agility.
September 15, 2019
Power BI: Great solution for reporting and dashboards!
- Reports and dashboards complexity were greatly reduced.
- Easy drill-down on selected information.
- Different types of views for the same information.
- The licensing cost might be a little high for some companies.
- It consumes a lot of resources.
- It's not very user intuitive on first use.
September 15, 2019
Strengths and Weaknesses of Microsoft Power BI
- Free license and tool is available in Microsoft office as an alternative to expensive tools in the same field
- Flexible to connect with multiple data sources and ERP systems
- Training modules are available for users with good detailed explanation
- Can publish review online for yourself and team-members and executives
- Multiple layout for visualization
- Editing data is bit difficult -- it requires dataset to be formatted in a particular manner, otherwise it will give errors and the user will end up most of the time in fixing the issue himself.
- Everytime data is required to be refreshed, which leads to the issue of regenerating the visualization
September 13, 2019
Look like a genius with your reports with PowerBI
- Easy to create beautiful charts that make the data very easy to understand.
- Ability to quickly add/remove certain contracts from the dataset and see the differences with and without these contracts.
- Mobile view is really nice too!
- Can be difficult to import certain data sets like MySQL that is on-prem.
- Takes a bit of getting used to using. Once you're using to it you look like a genius with how fast you can create reports.
- Pricing can become a bit much at scale.
September 13, 2019
Microsoft is one of the best tools for Data Analysis
- Lot of Packages available to represent the data
- Predictive and Visualization representation are very useful
- Lot of users are implementing new packages and share the same with users which helps in find quick solution to our requirements
- Open Source community as well provides help in case of any issues or solution needed
- Issues with finding a central repository to find out the implementation of packages
- Search more needed for finding the details of any package, for example, any package need to search a lot to find out the details
- Tutorials for beginners to explain the navigation and details
August 09, 2019
A great tool for the analyst's toolbox and for sharing reporting within a team or department.
- Data blending from several different files is a big hit with our Power BI users. We have so many excel and CSV files and many of them are not clean, so making use of the data cleaning and blending saves us from countless pivots and lookups to just get data worthy of analyzing.
- The visualizations are top notch, and available without additional cost. Everything is in vibrant colors and crisp, clear lines that whatever your produce is clearly pleasing to the eye. From mapping down to pie charts, the visuals are well done.
- The Beta preview is very helpful, not all software allows you to preview or use things in beta, but Power BI has a wonderful set of tools and visualizations you can add into your work with very little effort or complexity.
- Power BI lacks in horsepower compared to other tools with more robust ETL components built in. Particularly if you connect to any type of source system database like SQL, you have to either have a SQL View built for you that limits the volume of data your bring in, or have solid knowledge of the SQL table structures to build yourself custom (and correct!) connections to the tables.
- Security is not as robust as other BI tools, like Qlik Sense. We often need to restrict subsets of data by customer and even functional position of an individual within a customer. Power BI’s security seems to be built for using just within a company, so if you leverage your work outside the firewall there can be issues when figuring out security streams.
- I do not like the pricing. It’s really a dirty trick, Microsoft goes around and says the product is free. Well, the stand-alone is free, yes, but you have to pay for the “enterprise” version so you can share files. They say it only costs $10 a month/user, which again is a white lie. You need much more IT infrastructure and people to build SQL views and Tabular Models so you can use the tool, and Microsoft does not tell you that. So we find it is a good stand-alone tool to analytics, but a fairly heavy cost structure if you roll it out enterprise-wide as compared to Qlik or Tableau (which are more expensive per license, but require less back-office support).