Powerful Toolset and Maturing Rapidly
August 24, 2017

Powerful Toolset and Maturing Rapidly

Glenn Burnside | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

We use Power BI as our primary analysis and data visualization solution for reporting across multiple departments. We are able to develop measurement models faster using its DAX language, and import data from multiple sources and systems, at a faster rate and lower cost than any other solution we've tried. We also implement Power BI in multiple solutions with our clients, and have found that the flexibility of the modeling system, the richness of the data visualizations, and the ease of sharing inside an organization make it a near-ideal solution for our customers. Adoption on their part is easy, and we're able to deliver more value to them, faster.

Pros

  • Advanced Modeling with composable measurement definitions - makes it easy to answer business questions faster and move beyond basic SQL querying to allow us to ask new questions, or to model measurements across different slices of data, very quickly.
  • Data Visualization options are rich without being overly complicated. Chart types are structured and limited to those that are really valuable, and custom visualizations make it easy to add some visual "bling" when it's important or needed.
  • Easy to publish groups of data, reports, and dashboards in an "app" that users in the business can easily find and consume. Publishing model has gotten much simpler, and we can ship updates to apps very quickly to our entire organization.

Cons

  • Disparity between web- and desktop- app experience. You can only do "deep" modeling and analysis using power bi desktop, which complicates the authoring and publishing process.
  • Dashboards vs. reports is often confusing to end users, and the Q&A feature in the dashboards never quite seems to work like people expect it to.
  • Reports' interactive components (slicers especially) have a clunky user experience that makes them hard to get "right" for truly immersive interactive reporting experiences.
  • Time-based slicing of data is improving, but still needs to mature more. Difficult to slice to things like "two months ago" still.
We selected Power BI because it had more flexibility in modelling/measurement definition, excellent per-user pricing, easy self-implementation, integration with our other Office 365 tools, and easy distribution of content to others in the organization.
Great for when you want to develop a measurement/KPI model over a set of data or by combining multiple data sets together, and when you want to share that model and results with others in your organization.

Not as accessible for cases where you want analysts to be able to do open-ended analysis and exploration of datasets and models, or when end users need to be able to also create/extend with their own reports over a dataset.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.3
Pixel Perfect reports
5
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
8
8.0
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
8
Report sharing and collaboration
9
6.5
Publish to Web
9
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
3
Report Delivery Scheduling
6
9.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
10.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
8.7
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
8
8.3
REST API
8
Javascript API
8
iFrames
8
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
9

Comments

More Reviews of Microsoft Power BI

  1. Home
  2. Business Intelligence (BI) Tools
  3. Microsoft Power BI Reviews
  4. User Review of Microsoft Power BI