The BI tool for the masses
May 16, 2018
The BI tool for the masses
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is being used in our department to create internal reports within our group. The main sanctioned BI tool for our organization is Tableau, but we have to rely on a central IT group to produce dashboards. With Power BI, we can create and customize our own reports, but cannot widely distribute them.
- Power BI integrates seamlessly with PowerQuery which allows you to easily manipulate source data and add calculated columns for your data model.
- Producing a data model is very easy as Power BI makes visualizing the model schema and joins simple.
- Producing data visuals is so much more user-friendly than in Tableau. Customizing and producing visuals is very intuitive and there are tons of built-in visualizations to choose from ( however some are not explicitly Power BI approved and may not work properly).
- Sharing the dashboards is very easy and end-users can interact with the visualizations.
- Data and visualizations smoothly integrate with other Microsoft products such as PowerPoint and Access.
- Although BI is making great updates on a daily basis, there are still some limitations involved with the data modeling and certain visualizations.
First of all, Power BI is a fraction of the price of Tableau. Secondly, I found Tableau to be much less user-friendly than Power BI. Tableau is great if your organization wants to completely control BI and centralize it in the hands of highly skilled data analysts and IT teams. Power BI, on the other hand, is more egalitarian in that just about anyone can quickly understand how to use Power BI to create customized data models that are meaningful to them and churn out impressive looking interactive visuals. I highly prefer Power BI over Tableau.