Power BI: Best BI tool for companies that use Microsoft products.
January 21, 2020

Power BI: Best BI tool for companies that use Microsoft products.

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

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is used across the whole organization. In my department, I developed a Power BI based solution to better visualize the workload allocation for the engineering team in Brazil.
There is also a dashboard for observing the ongoing projects status and stages. Every department uses Power BI with different data sources but all solutions are targeting data visualization and ease of implementation.
Microsoft Power BI is a quick-to-implement software that makes it easier to deal with large datasets and create relationships between different data sources.
  • Importing data sources: Very intuitive way to import data, with pop-up wizards to guide the process.
  • Creating charts and graphs: It is possible to create charts and graphs just by dragging data fields, no programming required.
  • Power BI online is still very limited and also requires that every user has a pro license to see published dashboards.
  • If you need to make advanced changes to the imported data, it is required to learn the M-Query, which is a Power BI programming language.
Microsoft Power BI has better pricing, better features in the trial version. Power BI is also integrated with other Microsoft products, so you can publish dashboards to SharePoint pages and to Teams.
Power BI is also the easiest to use. It has more wizards and all the pop-ups are much more intuitive and well explained.
Best Suited: Visualization of data that is not easily accessible through Excel, data which are not yet treated and not refined. Microsoft Power BI makes it easier to showcase this data. Power BI is best used to display analytical information for untreated data, it has visuals that do statistical analysis and can be used with Artificial Intelligence to obtain more valuable information from different datasources.

Less Appropriate: Small data sources, which do not require a second software to display information in a visual way. Using/buying Power BI for small data sources is overkill and is going to generate unnecessary expenditures.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
10
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
10
Report sharing and collaboration
9
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
9
Delivery to Remote Servers
8
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
8
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10
REST API
8
Javascript API
10
iFrames
8
Java API
9
Themeable User Interface (UI)
9
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
9