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Business Intelligence for Office 365 allows users to model and analyze their data, and query large datasets with complex natural language queries. The tool also allows users to easily visualize their data in Excel with the help of Power View and Power Map.https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/tf/J4/TL3TT6LEJTTF.JPEGBI by MicrosoftPower BI for office 365 (now simply become {Power BI}, is a unique and general platform for managing business intelligence through Microsoft tools. The platform is then subdivided into services rather than desktop or mobile. Thanks to this, in my experience, it was possible to create customized and performing BI tools.,perfectly integrated with microsoft tools objects can be easily shared in mobile environments attractive dashboards,in the standard version it is not possible to do analysis by excel the Pro version is required for sharing jobs only a few data sources allow real time connections,8,Qlik view,7,8Power BI ReviewIt is used for pilot projects to asses the benefits of use.,Beautiful visuals Ease of use Powerful data manipulation language,I'd like to be able to use visuals based on different data sets in the same page. The visuals are limited - I'd like to see a ribbon plot for example. Would like to be able to use different data representations on the same visual. There's currently an ability to put lines on histograms but no ability to, for example, add points to a histogram or line plot. I understand some of these may be in development but you will never be able to create visuals for each possible combination. You need a way of combining two visuals into one - e.g. line and points. DAX is very powerful but a bit complicated for some users. I think you need to make some of the functionality that's available in DAX exposed at the UI level. The R visual gives the flexibility to plot a lot of stuff but it is limited by only being able to plot what's passed in the dataset. You need a text entry box that you can filter datasets by.,8,Tableau Desktop,9,1Power BI to reduce BS!I've supported Power BI for companies within the job recruiting area. We implemented the software for staff or more importantly the recruiters to upload data such as health care, real estate, IT, hedge funds and law firms to see what markets were most active and how to distribute staff for recruiting needed employees for their clients. There was no problem; it helped my clients focus on the needed markets with the visuals and dashboard so managers and "higher ups" can put together a strategy.,The dashboard is super easy to use. The GUI is flexible and updates as needed Customization was key for individuals and presentation purposes. Integration with Office 365 is another plus. The licensing made sense when pitching the proposal when a client is already running Office 365.,Well in general Microsoft support needs CPR. There are bugs such as some items you'd think were allowed on the dashboard are not options however from reading they are continuing to improve these concerns/features. Implementation can be finicky depending on how the current environment is configured.,7,Salesforce Analytics Cloud and Oracle BI Foundation Suite,Adobe Business Catalyst, Barracuda Web Filter, Palo Alto Networks PA-3000 Series,9,9,,30,Internally to manage employees To determine future growth and plan how to expand not just the company finances but what staffing/hardware may be needed.,Following trends to lean what markets are worth pursuing Real time reporting for my clients clients Helping companies make better financial decisions.,I like configuring a monitor/TV to display reports for the staff or clients in common areas. The customization make the tool fun to use.I love Power BI but I could love it moreI am a single person putting together reports/dashboards to send out for others to interpret. The biggest problem right now is there is no direct connection to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.,The visuals are excellent The interaction of data between graphs and charts The way the program saves how data sheets are manipulated.,Connection to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Dashboards need to automatically update when I upload a report Increase speed,9,We get our money's worth. Would be willing to pay more to get more out of a program.PowerBI.Com - Quick ReviewThis differs from company to company. I have implemented solutions for a single line of business within a company and across all lines within a company. Typically during a deployment, we will develop and release content for a single business line and then move to others. Power BI specifically will display the data you have prepared in the background. It can also be used, by power users / analysts, to explore their own data and to make their own analysis without having to go through IT once a solid data model is in place.,Easily create graphs and visualizations. Distributing dashboards & content packs Finding inconsistencies in data.,If a data source is deployed directly to PowerBI.com without using Power BI desktop, you will not have the ability to troubleshoot connectivity issues which often arise during Metadata and other changes to the model. Not for typical static reporting. No row based security within Power BI itself.,9,Tableau Desktop and QlikView,Salesforce.com, ConnectWise, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services,6,8
  3. Power BI For Office 365 Reviews
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Power BI For Office 365
184 Ratings
Score 7.9 out of 101
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Power BI For Office 365 Reviews

Power BI For Office 365
184 Ratings
Score 7.9 out of 101
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February 08, 2018

Power BI For Office 365 Review: "BI by Microsoft"

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Power BI for office 365 (now simply become {Power BI}, is a unique and general platform for managing business intelligence through Microsoft tools. The platform is then subdivided into services rather than desktop or mobile. Thanks to this, in my experience, it was possible to create customized and performing BI tools.
  • perfectly integrated with microsoft tools
  • objects can be easily shared in mobile environments
  • attractive dashboards
  • in the standard version it is not possible to do analysis by excel
  • the Pro version is required for sharing jobs
  • only a few data sources allow real time connections
If you want to get closer to the world of BI and work in a Microsoft environment you can definitely evaluate the tools of Power BI and see if they are right for you. I recommend you buy the PRO version otherwise you can not use the most useful features of BI. The cost is moreover certainly less than many other competitors.
Read this authenticated review
Richard Lorenz profile photo
June 06, 2016

Power BI For Office 365: "Power BI Review"

Richard Lorenz
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
It is used for pilot projects to asses the benefits of use.
  • Beautiful visuals
  • Ease of use
  • Powerful data manipulation language
  • I'd like to be able to use visuals based on different data sets in the same page.
  • The visuals are limited - I'd like to see a ribbon plot for example.
  • Would like to be able to use different data representations on the same visual. There's currently an ability to put lines on histograms but no ability to, for example, add points to a histogram or line plot. I understand some of these may be in development but you will never be able to create visuals for each possible combination. You need a way of combining two visuals into one - e.g. line and points.
  • DAX is very powerful but a bit complicated for some users. I think you need to make some of the functionality that's available in DAX exposed at the UI level.
  • The R visual gives the flexibility to plot a lot of stuff but it is limited by only being able to plot what's passed in the dataset.
  • You need a text entry box that you can filter datasets by.
Power BI Desktop does not make for good presentations. It would be good if there was a presentation mode.
Read Richard Lorenz's full review
Daniel J. Lewis profile photo
June 01, 2016

Power BI For Office 365 Review: "Power BI to reduce BS!"

Daniel J. Lewis
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
I've supported Power BI for companies within the job recruiting area. We implemented the software for staff or more importantly the recruiters to upload data such as health care, real estate, IT, hedge funds and law firms to see what markets were most active and how to distribute staff for recruiting needed employees for their clients. There was no problem; it helped my clients focus on the needed markets with the visuals and dashboard so managers and "higher ups" can put together a strategy.
  • The dashboard is super easy to use. The GUI is flexible and updates as needed
  • Customization was key for individuals and presentation purposes.
  • Integration with Office 365 is another plus. The licensing made sense when pitching the proposal when a client is already running Office 365.
  • Well in general Microsoft support needs CPR.
  • There are bugs such as some items you'd think were allowed on the dashboard are not options however from reading they are continuing to improve these concerns/features.
  • Implementation can be finicky depending on how the current environment is configured.
It's very flashy, and cost effective (if you are a gold partner which my clients were so we bundled their packages). It also does a great job compiling printable/email-able PDFs for reference. Another great feature is being able to display statistics on TVs for either internal or external use. It lets everyone know whats going on; being transparent.
Read Daniel J. Lewis's full review
Ryan Elfline profile photo
September 16, 2016

Power BI For Office 365 Review: "I love Power BI but I could love it more"

Ryan Elfline
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
I am a single person putting together reports/dashboards to send out for others to interpret. The biggest problem right now is there is no direct connection to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.
  • The visuals are excellent
  • The interaction of data between graphs and charts
  • The way the program saves how data sheets are manipulated.
  • Connection to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012
  • Dashboards need to automatically update when I upload a report
  • Increase speed
It's well suited for analytics for sales, utilization, downtime, and spending.
Read Ryan Elfline's full review
Andrew Failor profile photo
February 19, 2016

Power BI For Office 365: "PowerBI.Com - Quick Review"

Andrew Failor
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
This differs from company to company. I have implemented solutions for a single line of business within a company and across all lines within a company. Typically during a deployment, we will develop and release content for a single business line and then move to others. Power BI specifically will display the data you have prepared in the background. It can also be used, by power users / analysts, to explore their own data and to make their own analysis without having to go through IT once a solid data model is in place.
  • Easily create graphs and visualizations.
  • Distributing dashboards & content packs
  • Finding inconsistencies in data.
  • If a data source is deployed directly to PowerBI.com without using Power BI desktop, you will not have the ability to troubleshoot connectivity issues which often arise during Metadata and other changes to the model.
  • Not for typical static reporting.
  • No row based security within Power BI itself.
It is appropriate for creating graphs and visualizations. These can be created & then deployed or a data model can be deployed and power users can create their own graphs and visualizations.
Read Andrew Failor's full review
Kurt Kolb profile photo
February 16, 2016

Power BI For Office 365 Review: "Find the POWER"

Kurt Kolb
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We gather all of our sales and digital marketing data into BI and create reports for management that really show our effectiveness in the world. There are lots of extra features you get with this that can be customized and modified. Quite a bit better than the previous software we used.
  • We can view our whole business on one dashboard which we share at meetings
  • There report views are outstanding but could use more colour options
  • We are trying to embed their visuals for our app on mobile
  • I can not seem to find out how to export their files in other formats
  • They use SQL but we are moving to non SQL servers soon
  • Sometimes the data gets too squished on small monitors
Great where you have loads of data and need it analysed in a simple quick way without spending too much time thinking about the perfect format. I would worry about using it if you have a brand colour that cannot be matched to their schemes. You might not use it for external customers.
Read Kurt Kolb's full review
Eltjo Verweij profile photo
November 04, 2014

Power BI For Office 365 Review: "Almost there"

Eltjo Verweij
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
In our organization, Power BI is used for ad-hoc data analysis and some regular reports, next to other BI tools. Only data analysts use it to compile reports that are easily viewed in Excel by non-Power BI users. It is the tool of choice for combining data from multiple sources.
  • Ease of use. Most people have experience working with Excel. If you know how to create pivots, you can use Power BI.
  • Data extraction and transformation (ETL). ETL is a joy with Power Query. It is intuitive, simple and a magical experience to transform poor data into something useful.
  • Visuals. Power BI is beautiful to behold, especially Power View.
  • Maps. The interactive maps are great built-in tools.
  • Cost You cannot find anything cheaper than Power BI, unless you want to give it to every user in your company.
  • Automatic updates. A choice of a daily or weekly refresh is too slow for this era of real-time updates.
  • Speed. It takes a while to load all the data into memory. Data with more than one million records will take a few minutes to refresh. Once it is loaded, it starts being fairly fast.
  • Changing queries in Power Query. Although Microsoft is working on it, when you delete a step in Power Query, you might have to rebuild your data model. This defeats the purpose of having a fantastic user interface, in which it is simple to change queries.
Power BI is great for a daily or weekly report, or any ad-hoc queries. Ideally, all users should have Windows 8 and Excel 2013. If you have more than 500,000 records or need real-time updates, you might want to look for another BI tool.
Read Eltjo Verweij's full review
Ranjeet Kumar profile photo
November 04, 2014

Power BI For Office 365 Review: "Just BI"

Ranjeet Kumar
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
My organization is not using Office 365 yet. I did the research myself and have a given demo to my organization. We may purchase and use it.
  • It's a self service BI. It's very easy to discover, analyze and visualize data.
I believe it can be used for personal or professional needs.
Read Ranjeet Kumar's full review
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September 19, 2016

Power BI For Office 365 Review: "Power BI - Worth the O365 Upgrade"

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We are using Power BI to create better visual representations for both internal use as well as customer facing analysis. It's not adopted across the entire organization yet but we are in the process of doing so.
  • Ease of data import
  • Easy to learn the basic operation of the software
  • Like many Microsoft products, you can get by with a small understanding of the product, but to truly realize the entire potential does take a while to learn.
  • Hooking up SQL databases to the cloud version is a more complex than just querying right into the database from the desktop version.
We frequently use the mapping feature to overlay areas in which we have strong operations and areas in which our customers have needs to quickly visualize opportunities to new and existing clients. We are also beginning to develop internal scorecards with it. One downside is we haven't discovered a way to automate a data refresh from the SQL connection, so you have to remember to refresh the data (which can take a little while depending on how much data your looking for) every time.
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March 26, 2015

Power BI For Office 365 Review: "Power BI worth a look? YES!"

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
I'm a Senior BI Consultant, and have been developing reports with various tools for many years. I started with Crystal Reports, then Hyperion (Brio) Interactive Reporting, Microsoft SSRS, and then Excel Power Pivot. Once I started developing Excel Power Pivot reports and analytical solutions, I was hooked. When the addition of the other Powers: Power Query, Power View, and Power MAPS, I can say I am one of the biggest evangelists of the Microsoft BI Stack out there, and no, I don't work for Microsoft. I don't often look for work developing Power BI Solutions, the work finds me, and I am always glad to work with a client that knows benefits of utilizing Excel to it's maximum capacity. I mean, everyone already has Excel, and finding resources to support what I've built once I move on to the next project is always fairly painless. I'm glad to leave a maintainable solution in the hands of my client, and Power BI is the only BI Development tool that does ETL, Data Models, Drag and Drop report building, Pivot Tables, and more in an environment that's well known.
  • Drag and drop report development
  • Flexibility with Power Views, Pivot Tables, ETL, and Data Modeling all in one
  • Price
  • Power View is still in the early stages, so customization of the look and feel is a bit limited.
If you already have Excel, you want Power BI.
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May 21, 2014

Review: "Power BI for Office 365 - A compelling data analytics platform for personal and team use"

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

We are a Microsoft partner, with my line of business focusing on creating data-driven solutions for our customers, ranging from IT-sponsored enterprise data warehouse initiatives to small team and personal business analytics solutions. My consulting team uses Power BI for primarily two purposes: 1) to create pilot/proof-of-concept solutions for our customers to help launch them on their BI journey; 2) to perform data analytics on larger enterprise data-driven initiatives. The agility of the Excel-based solution, combined with the power of the in-memory PowerPivot data engine, more than meets our need for the these 2 purposes. Our customers appreciate it because it allows them to remain in their very familiar Excel environment.

We are working with mostly finance/accounting departments, and in some cases, business analysts (or "power users") within the business community (sales, marketing, etc.). We are solving finance challenges like Accounts Receivable collections, along with operational challenges such as monitoring year-over-year sales metrics and comparing them to budgets that come from two data locations. In addition, we're solving painful "process issues" like trying to import multiple files into a single data set. We are literally reducing process time from days to minutes!

  • Provides flexible and powerful analytics on large datasets. PowerPivot, the in-memory database engine, can handle 100's of millions of rows of data, giving 1-2 second response time for aggregate data analysis.
  • Provides an adaptable environment to perform analytics. When combining data together in PowerPivot, you have the ability to create Excel tables, combine them with database queries, and then join that with data coming from a web-service provider.
  • Powerful web-based deployment capabilities. SharePoint technologies have been a part of the Microsoft BI solution stack for some time. Office 365 provides a powerful way to deploy the Power BI analytics to a wider audience in a secure way, allowing for flexible access from most any device, whether phone, tablet, or computer.
  • Power Query, one of the components of Power BI, is one of my favorite parts of the solution. Basically, you have at your disposal an end-user "ETL" (Extract, Transform, Load) tool, all within Excel. We've reduced multi-step, manual processes to single-click, automatic application of business rules to collect and transform data into a usable format. No need for VLOOKUP any longer with this capability.
  • Licensing: Currently, Microsoft has a fixed pricing model for Office 365 users, regardless of role/function of the user. Most organizations have a small number of "power users" that create usable content and many more "consumers" that simply view/run reports created by power users. Microsoft does not differentiate between these users, and thus the pricing limits organizations from large deployments of the software.
  • Version incompatibility: Excel 2010 and 2013 workbooks are compatible with each other. However, workbooks created in 2010 that include PowerPivot databases must be upgraded to 2013 format to run in 2013. Subsequently, you cannot open these upgraded PowerPivot workbooks in 2010. This requires ALL users to be on the same version.
  • Visualization: Excel charting with PowerPivot workbooks is adequate for many users. Power View also contains a number of GREAT visualizations, including animated bubble charts and a very flexible dashboard/report design canvas. However, compared to some of the other self-service BI solutions, it is still limited in its visualization capabilities.

Well-suited: In small-to-medium size businesses (SMB), Power BI is a wonderful solution. The speed to design and deploy a highly valuable solution makes it a fantastic selection for these businesses. Also, individual or small teams, even in large corporations, can benefit from it. Finally, accounting, finance, and business analysts are the "sweet-spot audience" for Power BI. Also, Power BI is great for designing prototypes or mockups of future enterprise capabilities.

Less Appropriate: Information Technology team developing an enterprise analytics solution. Power BI is not intended to be an enterprise solution. Power BI is fully capable of handling millions of rows of data for analysis. However, in more complex analytical scenarios, where complex rules are incorporated into the data model over VERY LARGE sets of data (in particular, dimensional/structural data), the PowerPivot solution is not as strong. It is generally recommended that you upgrade to SQL Server Analysis Services for these scenarios.

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Power BI For Office 365 Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (184)
7.9
Likelihood to Renew (4)
9.2
Data Sharing and Collaboration (7)
7.8
Data Sources (6)
7.1

Feature Scorecard Summary

Pixel Perfect reports (6)
7.9
Customizable dashboards (7)
7.8
Report Formatting Templates (6)
7.8
Drill-down analysis (7)
7.0
Formatting capabilities (7)
7.0
Integration with R or other statistical packages (4)
7.9
Report sharing and collaboration (7)
6.1
Publish to Web (7)
7.0
Publish to PDF (7)
6.8
Report Versioning (4)
6.5
Report Delivery Scheduling (2)
6.0
Delivery to Remote Servers (1)
6
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (6)
7.0
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization (7)
7.9
Predictive Analytics (4)
5.3
Multi-User Support (named login) (6)
7.0
Role-Based Security Model (4)
6.9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete) (5)
6.9
Single Sign-On (SSO) (1)
7
Responsive Design for Web Access (7)
6.9
Dedicated iOS Application (6)
7.4
Dedicated Android Application (4)
7.5
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile (6)
5.5

About Power BI For Office 365

Business Intelligence for Office 365 allows users to model and analyze their data, and query large datasets with complex natural language queries. The tool also allows users to easily visualize their data in Excel with the help of Power View and Power Map.
Categories:  Data Discovery and Visualization,  Business Intelligence

Power BI For Office 365 Technical Details

Operating Systems: Unspecified
Mobile Application:No