Power BI for a Financial Analyst who doesn't have the patience to wait for IT
April 17, 2017

Power BI for a Financial Analyst who doesn't have the patience to wait for IT

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

It is only used by a small handful of departments - finance, financial planning, audit, and IT. So it hasn't reached the masses yet. We are talking about less than 10 users in a Fortune 500 company.

For a financial analyst with a novice level of IT knowledge, Power BI is able to gather and handle VERY large amounts of data while slicing and dicing quickly how you want it. Once you get past several million rows of data, Excel blows up. That's where Power BI comes in.
  • The filtering is top notch. I am able to create a 'dashboard' so to speak where I can click filters off and on. For instance, if I want to select one year or multiple years, one channel (such as e-commerce), or all channels. etc. Once you have it set up, it is very easy to use, and easy for non-users to view in a presentation type scenario.
  • There are so many options for graphs that I switch to right on the spot. Sometimes I find myself just clicking through them just to try to see what works and many times I'll come across a visualization that fits which I hadn't even thought of.
  • It's free. As users, you have nothing to lose. The best way to learn is to have everyone who is testing it out to communicate openly about what they discover.
  • I love creating a matrix. It's very similar to the pivot in Excel. However, when I export out of power Bi into Excel, it turns back into a raw data dump. From there I can do the pivot in Excel, but what's the point of doing the matrix then. I would like for the data to export how the matrix is showing.
  • Small but important tasks like inserting a column, combining metrics like time and year, and many others take 3 or 4 steps instead of 1 to 2.
  • Googling "how to" when figuring out a sticky situation in Power BI doesn't always lead to a resolution. It's probably because not enough folks use Power BI like Excel, for instance, and thus you might only find one explanation to go by. And in some cases that ONE explanation isn't worded quite right for a particular user's level of expertise. With Excel, you Google a problem, and there are many write-ups to read through. And one of those write-ups turns the light bulb on in your head in your head. Or better yet you might read several different ways to solve a problem. Don't normally have that luxury with Power BI.
I am an just a business analyst

Power BI is used by someone like me in a scenario where I want to bypass IT (which can take transaction data and slice it in SQL or HALO) but at the same time could never replace Anaplan or Excel where the raw data is small enough to be handled by those platforms. So the situation for me has to be just right to bring Power BI into the fold......an extremely large amount of untouched raw data.

In other words there really is no "other" for Power BI. if the situation is just right, then Power BI is the only way.
If you have transaction data, Power Bi has to be looked at. In our business, we have agreements numbers and customer numbers. Those agreements can incorporate several inventory SKU numbers. Our inventory hierarchy is very large from appliances to furniture to electronics and Power BI is able to take all that, with countless dimensions, and break it all down for us, to where we can compare one specific scenario versus another. However, if you have a large amount of data that can be handled through multiple tabs of an Excel spreadsheet, then Power BI is too time-consuming and nuanced to bother with. If the data you have is already summarized in any form, by programs used by the IT department like SQL, then Power BI is rendered unnecessary.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

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