Nice dashboards and easy to adapt when you know Excel.
Updated November 15, 2019

Nice dashboards and easy to adapt when you know Excel.

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

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

I have used Microsoft Power BI to create automated reports, dashboards for our clients finance department. The reports were consisting of financial targets, actual and forecasts. Along with the reports, we used formula generation functionalities and made auto calculations. It is a good reporting dashboard when it comes to display most current values along with auto calculations. Before Power BI, excel reports or ppt presentations would be distributed within the organization. With Power BI, the dashboards and data visualization became more professional looking.

Pros

  • It has a free version offered with Microsoft Office 365. So businesses with this type of license can enjoy it free.
  • Good dashboards, auto calculation and database connection capabilities.
  • Easy to learn and use when you have familiarity with Excel. You can reach free training material on many platforms.
  • Well integrated with other Microsoft programs (Excel, Access)

Cons

  • Expensive if you want on premise version. Choose the best fitting license.
  • There are some functionalities that require detailed learning. You need to have good experience with Excel, database connections, DAX.
  • Data quality matters. If you have uncleaned data, then your work on Power BI can be frustrating as it is poor on providing suggestions.
  • You may encounter with performance issues when your data is big.
MS Power BI has that nice feeling as it is a product of Microsoft family, the adaptation period of your organization will be easier. You can use your knowledge on Excel, and enjoy better data visualization, graphs, charts, data calculation capabilities. You can find more free online training material on forums, video sites. It can integrate with other MS products.
It actually depends on the size of the organization and person who will work with Power BI. If you have a big organization, need many reports and need dashboard visualization. Choose it. But be sure the user has good knowledge on Excel, database connections and DAX. If you are a small business you may want to stay on Excel. In any case you can try.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.3
Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
7
7.3
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
7
6.5
Publish to Web
7
Publish to PDF
6
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
7.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
7.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
7
Role-Based Security Model
Not Rated
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Not Rated
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Not Rated
6.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
6
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
6
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

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