Microsoft Power BI - Excel Lovers Dream

I will renew because the pain to change, rip out and buy new is simply too much to live through. I am under the assumption that this is still 1.0. Microsoft will better my concerns and I still see them adding features from time to time. They have released new versions of the Power Query, and the Gateway over the past couple of months. They have single evenhandedly turned Excel from the preferred tool of presentation to making Excel Middle ware. Middle Ware? Don't hang up and close the browser yet. Yup, its middle ware. Excel connects to the data, SQL database or the data model, Excel is the tool that passes the information to the real presentation layer. Excel is just a middleware tool that has become more powerful than ever and the platform that Microsoft BI resides upon.

While my review may seem at times critical its the familiarity of the tools (Excel), ease of use, and price that make Microsoft BI the recommended tool for the small to medium size company looking for BI.

Microsoft has pulled a great trick. The trick is getting you into the pricing for only $20 to $50 dollars a month. They then made it very easy to push to the SharePoint site and keep it updated with free gateway product that will keep your reports live and consistently updated. Now here is a gotcha....IF you use the Data modeling tool (Power Query) for example that is then connected to a large database, you will have no issues. The issues begin at publishing information to SharePoint. There is a size limitation to how large the excel sheet can be. I would point out that we are not making large spread sheets with Pivot tables and millions of rows of data. We are simply connecting through Power Query. The sheet is still very small but the issue is the data model size. This is tapped at a gig on SharePoint. To be considered a true enterprise product, this size limitation will have to be overcome.

There is a (not sure if beta or not) version of some of the power views that can be done in Power BI. These views when rendered locally are wonderful. When they are rendered from the web, they can take a little longer. The part that can be agonizing is the showing views through HTML5. This is almost unworkable when using power maps or maps through power view. The response is so jittery that it is almost unusable.

Usability is great. This product will make most feel right at home. I feel like this question should be asked from two points of view:

1. Creator of reports, Data Models, Views etc: Most Advanced users will still rate the usability as very high. Its capabilities are still robust. However when compared to other Enterprise Class products it will not do many of the advanced application queries.

2. End user, Consumer: All end users will feel right at home. Many will be able to create connections to already created data models and other external publicly available sources like twitter, Facebook, World Health order etc... These connections are then in turn very very easily available to publish to SharePoint and Power BI.

It took me a while to understand what I think is Microsoft's strategy. This will handle all but the most of robust needs. Much like many American made cars and my favorite Corvette, Microsoft is fast, has it own break downs from time to time but all of these are really to tolerate when the price is considered and the next one up that can out perform it is three to four times as much money makes this an easy one to still recommend.