It's Excel for Big Data. So easy, so cheap, so fast, and powerful enough most everything.
Updated August 07, 2016
It's Excel for Big Data. So easy, so cheap, so fast, and powerful enough most everything.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft BI
Microsoft BI is, and seemingly shall be, the "BI Tool Of Tomorrow" forever. There are few people using it at my organization. In general, whenever I tell technically savvy people in the analytics/consulting space that there's a free visualization tool in Microsoft Excel that's 90-95% as good as Tableau, they are like "What?!" Then, they forget all about it in favor of expensive clunky tools and straight up coding.
Microsoft BI is a many-times-relabelled tool for visualization and lite analytics. It's like super duper Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts that let you work with big data. As an analytics tool per se, it's as good as Excel since it is Excel. I wouldn't do any analytics heavy lifting with it personally, but you can easily do algebra stuff and make derived variables. The real business benefit is visualization. It's just very easy and powerful.
Microsoft BI is a many-times-relabelled tool for visualization and lite analytics. It's like super duper Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts that let you work with big data. As an analytics tool per se, it's as good as Excel since it is Excel. I wouldn't do any analytics heavy lifting with it personally, but you can easily do algebra stuff and make derived variables. The real business benefit is visualization. It's just very easy and powerful.
- EASY visualization of business data. Excel is the killer app so anybody remotely good at basic office tools knows how to make PivotTables and PivotCharts. If you don't, it's really easy to learn; give it a try... People think big data visualization is hard but it's not for most business use cases.
- FAST visualization of business data. There are BI/Analytics tools out there, some of them beginning with the letter S, that are slooow. I do my taxes waiting for them to run basic queries/filters/charts. Microsoft BI (and Tableau, etc.) create compact data models to allow for pretty fast data loading and slicery.
- FREE or at least REALLY CHEAP visualization of business data. Who has MS Office on their business computer? Oh, everybody. If you don't have Office Pro, pony up for that or get the monthly license. The bigness of data you can run on your own machine is fairly big; don't use cloud if you don't need it. By comparison, who enjoys throwing thousands of dollars away on bloated legacy BI software? Well, too many companies, apparently.
- More than two dimensions. Yes, I know that 2D is the core of Excel's DNA. However, we're starting to deal with higher-dimensional arrays here in analytics land so better visualization support would be cool.
- UI weirdness. By default, you are flipping back between regular Excel tabs and super-top-secret BI tabs. You create charts in one place, but look at them in the other. That kind of stuff. I know there are a couple of other ways to interact with Microsoft BI, but please figure out the main way.
- Better hookups to other analytics tools including Microsoft's. Microsoft BI has a good variety of data connections, and I don't expect it to bloom into a full-fledged analytics tool, but it may be a good idea to keep hammering at connectivity with "hardcore" analytics. In my case, Python stuff.
- Tableau Desktop, Google Analytics, Google Charts, SAP Crystal Reports, SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Analytics, QlikView and D3.js
Looking at the visualization portion of BI, there are three types of tools.
- Programming packages. Free and powerful, they let you make any diagram, at the cost of difficulty of use.
- Specialist software like Tableau and Microsoft BI. This is the best choice in most cases due to ease of use and quality of output.
- More generic software offered by the big IT companies, often part of a BI suite. There's really a lot of variety here. Use this when it fits the workflow and you are already using the relevant software. But, personally, I'd still use the specialist software.
Microsoft BI (MSBI) Feature Ratings
Using Microsoft BI
20 - That "20" is my best guess. We have over 100 people doing analytics here and I'm not exactly going to do a census. Some of us use Excel in its fancy capacity, but most just use Excel as Excel.
Again, if you don't count IT support for the database side of things, I am having difficulty imagining why one would need support for Power BI any more than one would need support for chewing one's food.
Using Microsoft BI
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Familiarity. It's Excel. It's a spreadsheet. Come on.
- Thinking in matrices (PivotTables) takes a little getting used to, but it's not hard. For people without a good high school math background, it may seem unintuitive.
- Charts and PivotCharts are fairly easy, but Microsoft has a ways to go to make them less ugly.
- Data source connections. It's sometimes difficult to replace and update connections.
- Dropping certain types of fields into the Pivot Table (example: default aggregation type for values).
- The weird interface. Microsoft tried to have it both ways by using the standard Excel interface for some tasks, and the "Power" interface for others. It's just awkward, cumbersome, and confusing.