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Need to get started with Business Intelligence, check out Microsoft Power BI!
February 17, 2017

Need to get started with Business Intelligence, check out Microsoft Power BI!

Richard Bird | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

We considered using Microsoft Power BI for a warehouse performance metric dashboard. We were able to piece together a Proof of Concept and it worked well. However, we ran into a few limitations that would require us to license more than the free version. But we were able to use Power BI to help us better visualize the solution. We ended up writing up a solution in VB. However, we could not justify the cost for a single dashboard. We continue to keep it in mind for other uses.
  • Data Visualization
  • Business Intelligence
  • Sharing Data Dashboards
  • Live Database Sync (requires additional licensing)
  • Dashboard Slideshow
  • Automatic Data Modeling
I thinking Microsoft Power BI is a great start for someone who wants something more powerful and distributable than Excel. During my relatively short evaluation, I did not find Power BI to be up to the task of more powerful tools. However it might compete well if properly configured and managed. Many of the competitors offer stronger innovative tools for serious BI.
Power BI could be well suited for either very simple visualizations that only need to be updated on a daily basis, or for a presentation. It is helpful with exploring data and data relationships. I find it to be a much stronger tool than Excel (Power Pivot or Power Query). It's good for sharing data visualizations with others since the summarized data can be stored securely in the Office 365 cloud service and shared with others. Since the summarized data is stored in the cloud everyone is updated when the author updates the summarized data. Office 365 users should defiantly consider Power BI as it integrates well with other Office 365 products.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
6.3
Pixel Perfect reports
5
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
7
7.0
Drill-down analysis
6
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
8
7.5
Publish to Web
9
Publish to PDF
7
Report Versioning
7
Report Delivery Scheduling
7
6.7
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
7
Predictive Analytics
6
8.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
6.7
Responsive Design for Web Access
4
Mobile Application
8
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
8
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated