1. Home
  2. Business Intelligence (BI) Tools
  3. Microsoft Power BI Reviews
  4. User Review of Microsoft Power BI
A capable and powerful BI tool from Microsoft
December 07, 2017

A capable and powerful BI tool from Microsoft

Thomas J. Curran | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

Our legacy applicant tracking system had some decent reporting abilities, but very little in the way of visualization options for that data. It was simply stored in MS SQL and if we wanted to do anything really useful with that data, we'd need to export it into Excel and manipulate it there.

With connecting Power BI directly to the database, we can build very nice visuals on dashboards and then potentially share them with other employees across the organization.
  • It's able to connect with a wide array of data sources.
  • The number of different options for visualizations is impressive.
  • Because some of the functionality resembles those in MS Excel, the learning curve is a little less steep.
  • Loading data can sometimes take a long time - would be nice if that could be faster.
  • Using Power BI's browser to find the specific tables you need in your data is not easy for someone unless they are very familiar with databases or their data is very neatly laid out and labeled well.
  • The UI could use a little modernization, but it's not bad.
If you already subscribe to Office365 as we do, it's included so there's very little downside to downloading it and giving it a shot. If you have large chunks of data that you'd really like to be able to visualize and then share that info via dashboards to lots of users, I can't think of a better tool out there.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.5
Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
7
7.7
Drill-down analysis
6
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
9
7.3
Publish to Web
7
Publish to PDF
7
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
9.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
9.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
Not Rated
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
Not Rated
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
Not Rated
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated

Using Microsoft Power BI

1 - I handle a variety of responsibilities as the System Manager. Those include (but are not limited to) managing out ATS/CRM system, providing user support, conducting trainings, expanding our ATS/CRM's capabilities through customizations, providing reporting for all levels of the company including ad hoc reporting and report dashboards on subjects ranging from user usage, job board ROI, sales activity, etc.