Item: Microsoft Power BI
Rating: 9
Author: Peter Baker

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We built out numerous dashboards in order to support the analysis post-data gathering for all our core discovery methodologies.

This allowed us to quickly spin up are variable data sets mid- and or post-project in order to start validating results and identify areas required for cleaning etc. prior to analysis and presentation back to our clients with the results.

The free visual market place really helped bolster the initially limiting range of visualizations it comes with out of the box.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Data Links, Visual Aid, and Wizard make the process very simple. We found we needed a two-way link 99% of the time but the default was a one-way link that needs changing each time you import etc.
Terminology and usability are similar to Excel and Access making it easy to pick up and start creating for most advanced users of those applications.
Very powerful out of the box, and even when using the free service it is incredibly capable if working on smaller data sets.

Cons

Limited visualizations out of the box, market place does help improve this.
Some visuals, such as maps, are a bit limiting by default
Method of creation is very different from Tableau or Spotfire increasing learning time when switching platforms.
Many statistical elements cannot be visualized or calculated such as Confidence Levels, Intervals etc. This must be added.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop and TIBCO Spotfire

Microsoft Power BI has a better UI for the most part, runs efficiently, and has an excellent data management & transformation mechanism.

It is lacking some more advanced features of the latter (TIBCO Spotfire), but I firmly believe this is the better tool for most pieces of analysis I have had to perform.

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop, TIBCO Spotfire

Likelihood to Recommend

This is probably my favorite BI platform I have used to date. It feels a bit younger though, missing some features other platforms have. However, it makes up for this with its low price point for small businesses and great feature set that allows easy elimination of bugs and errors in your dashboards through to the ability to layer visuals on top of each other to get around things like limited numbers of Axis in certain visuals.

There are a few things you have to tweak constantly, tucked away in dropdown menus, that could be much more intuitive actions by clicking on components in visuals, like changing a title, axis name, etc. But the foundations are solid.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

Comments

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Wonderful Data Visualisation Platform. Perfect for Smaller Organisations At Lower Price Point.