Overall Power BI is a solid tool
March 30, 2018
Overall Power BI is a solid tool
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI
We used Power BI for any of the interactive dashboards or graphics we needed as a company. These dashboards were used by multiple departments within the company so they could gather the appropriate insights into how they should progress. This tool is very useful in starting a "story" and following it down the path of figuring out the trouble spots.
- Power BI is great for interactivity, the various aspects of your dashboard work well together with minimal tweaking
- Power BI is easy to use and design on, the drag and drop or double click features work smoothly and normally auto-generate an appropriate chart type. If you do need to change the type, that is done with the click of a button.
- Power BI makes it easy enough to add custom formula fields to your data set, this could probably use some improvement, but it is easy enough to still be a plus for the tool.
- Power BI lacks slightly in the customization options you have for a chart. You can probably do most of what you need, but it's not as smooth as other tools
- Power BI needs to get the functionality that Tableau has for map "grouping" options. Power BI has a lot of plug-ins available for maps and map types, but grouping data into chunks is difficult. Tableau allows you to lasso a "region"/"group" and report on that, it would be AWESOME if Power BI gets that feature as well.
- Building/cleaning your data set is a process, the Wizard is helpful, but the process is slow. This could be an environment issue though and not a Power BI, but from my experience, while the steps to build a data set are helpful, they take more time than I would like to see.
Power BI is a good tool overall. The price tag is way lower than Tableau which is a plus, but as you can expect, with a lower price you will probably miss out on a feature here or there. Tableau definitely is more feature rich with the customization and functionality of building out your dashboard and modifying the reports, but Power BI is not very far behind so it could definitely be a contender. You will have to weigh the options of price vs feature and figure out if the additional aspects of Tableau are worth the additional cost vs something like Power BI which will get you most of what you want in a dashboard tool.