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Power BI-- Getting There
December 13, 2017

Power BI-- Getting There

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

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

We use Power BI to create and share dashboards for users and teams in various departments to get a better understanding of the success of their processes. It's also used to track the progress of department and individual performance goals.
  • Because of a strong relationship between Power BI and Excel, Excel power users should find that the Power BI learning curve isn't too steep. Anyone familiar with Power Query, in particular, will find Power BI to be happily similar in many ways.
  • It's very easy to import and massage data from a wide variety of sources. The interface allows for some powerful data cleaning and wrangling without the need to learn the underlying M language.
  • Microsoft appears to be committed to Power BI; improvements and new functionality are added frequently.
  • Because it's fairly new to the party, there is a lot of functionality more mature products like Tableau and QlikView have that Power BI doesn't (yet).
  • While inexpensive enough, I'm not crazy about the pricing model of cost-free development while requiring individual end-users to purchase licenses.
As mentioned earlier, Power BI is not as mature as QlikView or Tableau and, as a result, is more limited in the kinds of things it's capable of. That said, it's still highly capable of fulfilling most typical BI dashboard requirements. We chose Power BI partly because of a very specific and unusual set of circumstances that wouldn't apply to anyone else, and partly because we could begin developing dashboards without having to go through the usual (lengthy) process of waiting for budget approval. Since developers can develop at no cost, we were able to begin creating dashboards while the process of getting funding for the end-users was working its way through the system.
Power BI is well suited to anyone with a deep understanding of Excel. I also recommend it to anyone who doesn't already know and use a similar tool like Tableau or QlikView. The amount of time from knowing nothing to building a reasonably functional dashboard is shorter with Power BI than the other products, in my opinion (having used all three). It can also be also a good introduction to BI tools in general since they all do more or less the same things, but sometimes the complexities of a process can obscure the bigger picture. I feel like I understand QlikView better after learning Power BI than I did after learning only QlikView.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.0
Pixel Perfect reports
6
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
8.0
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
8
6.6
Publish to Web
7
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
6
Report Delivery Scheduling
6
Delivery to Remote Servers
6
7.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
7
6.8
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
6
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
6
Single Sign-On (SSO)
7
7.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
7
Mobile Application
7
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
7
6.8
REST API
6
Javascript API
7
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
6
Themeable User Interface (UI)
8
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated

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