Power BI is the Top Data Visualization Tool on the Market
March 17, 2017
Power BI is the Top Data Visualization Tool on the Market
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI
We originally put together some projects in Power BI surrounding the methods by which shareholders contact us. Our dashboards included visualizations of how our shareholders call us, use our IVR, and access our website. We also made some visualizations regarding demographics. We are possibly looking in the future to utilize Power BI for replacing OLAP cubes in Excel. Currently we are only using Power BI among a small number of groups in different regions as we are still exploring fuller implementation. I find Power BI to be an extremely useful and easy-to-learn tool (if you have previous Excel experience) that only becomes more and more useful each month when updates come out. Power BI's data visualization capabilities makes it easy to make discoveries in our vast amount of data and present it in an easy-to-absorb way.
- Constant updates and improvements. Power BI provides FREE major updates every month which has been making the product more and more useful over time. Reading the update log is always exciting because Microsoft is always putting out new features are legitimately useful for me.
- Power BI connects easily to a huge variety of data sources, even those outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. You can even connect to websites and pull data right off of their pages. For example, you can link to Google or Yahoo Finance and pull information about stocks right into your dashboard for free.
- Tons of visualizations. Power BI has many different visualizations for dashboards and more are released every month. On top of those that are released, you can download more from the web as they are open-source. You can even code your own.
- Power BI is increasing its R capabilities which is excellent as R is the most widely used statistical programming language. This makes it so Power BI easily integrates into already established data science departments. R can also be used to add more visualizations to Power BI.
- Power BI is the cheapest data visualization tool at $10 per month per user. You can also get a lot done with the free version.
- Power BI might be difficult to learn for those who do not have intermediate or above experience with Excel or understanding of a programming language. The DAX language used to manipulate data in Power BI would probably be difficult for those working on the business side (as opposed to IT) who don't use Excel heavily.
- Although some improvements have been made, there could still be more options for customizing visuals and graphics. More tight control of the aesthetics of dashboards would help with meeting branding standards.