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A great way to visualize your data
Updated November 09, 2016

A great way to visualize your data

jim paroly | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

Power BI is a very good tool to create quick reports with beautiful visualizations and a great tool to research your data visually. I think that seeing your data in a visual way can help you see things you may miss with a standard report. I use it to track my projects to compare costs and revenues.
  • Power BI allows you to show or look at your data in different types of visualizations easily and quickly.
  • It is light-weight with great selection of visualization tools (with many add-ons available for extra types of visualization).
  • You can create reports using the easy to use and elegant looking dashboard which would be familiar to Excel users.
  • The data you analyze can come from single or multiple data sources, with a huge selection of data source types.
  • The reports and graphs you create can be easily customized to suit your needs or taste.
  • New features are being added rapidly (which can be a con for some as it can result in having to re-learn to use some of the operations).
  • May be a little hard at first for users with no Excel (or competing products) [experience].
  • Can be slow with large amounts of data.
  • Office 365 version of Power BI is not as easy to use as the desktop version.
  • Exporting and integration with other products can be improved.
  • I'm using the free version, so the only investment was the time spent to learn how to use the product (which as an Excel user, was very short).
  • I use Excel to store every single bit of information about all the projects I do, and being able to see them visualized helped me see some redundant steps I was taking.
  • No negative impact at all for me.
  • Excel
Microsoft's Power BI is what Excel graphing and pivoting should have been like. Power BI has much better ways to look at your data visually than you can with Excel's own tools. You can select from many built-in graph types or you can use the growing number of add-ons to get even more ways to visualize your data. Customizing reports/graphs is also much easier in Power BI.
I think that anyone who works with data (costs, customer, advertising, etc) can benefit from seeing their data visually. Power BI has various types of visualization options that allow you to look at your data in ways a standard report just can't and you WILL see information you've missed before. It may not be best for users with very large amounts of data.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
8.7
Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
9
8.0
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
9
8.0
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
Not Rated
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
10.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
Not Rated
Role-Based Security Model
Not Rated
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Not Rated
8.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
8
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Using Microsoft Power BI

1 - budget planning
ad campaign planning
1 - anyone with Excel knowledge will be at home with Power BI. An understanding of pivoting is recommended.
  • Plan project budget based on previous projects
  • Assess AdWord campaign success
  • Compare expenses against income based on similar past projects
  • If and when my business will grow, I will be using the BI collaboration features to track all employee projects
I find it helpful and easy to use

Evaluating Microsoft Power BI and Competitors

Yes - it replaced Excel as it has much better visualization and publishing options.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Third-party Reviews
features. I was looking for a product that expands on Excel capabilities.
I am happy with how and what I have selected.
I could have read more reviews.

Using Microsoft Power BI

Easy to use
Modern interface that will be familiar to Office users
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Selecting visualization type
  • Connecting to data sources
Yes, but I don't use it - i have never tried it.