Item: Microsoft Power BI
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company uses Power BI for our entire organizational reporting. We are a mid-size company with several different departments that each have their own unique ways of looking at things. Power BI enables us to provide that level of detail while at the same time being able to roll up data to be easily consumed by executives and management.

Pros and Cons

Report distribution.
Ease of setting up data models.
Constantly improving.

Dataset Management.
Confusing Licensing models.
Multiple programming languages used.

Return on Investment

Provides better more accurate data.
Provides data very quickly.
Becomes more expensive because everyone wants to start using it.

Alternatives Considered

BrightGauge and Tableau Desktop

Power BI is a lot more versatile. I describe it to people as you can go as deep as you want/need to. This is somewhat of a pain point because sometimes I feel like I have to be a coder in order to accomplish something complex but most of the time it is incredibly user friendly and intuitive in order to accomplish most task. I have found that other software tend to lean too far to one extreme or the other so Power BI seemed like the clear choice.

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft Power BI delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Power BI's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Power BI live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Power BI go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Power BI again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Power Automate (formerly microsoft flow)

Usability

It is incredibly easy to use and learn. Microsoft hosts what they call "Dashboard in a day" sessions where users can go from knowing nothing to building some pretty nice dashboards in the course of one day. The only thing that keeps it from a 10 is that there are multiple languages used (DAX, m query) that to the non-coders out there always gets confusing.

Support Rating

Power BI has been great. One of the things that I love the most is that they do substantial updates monthly and have a very large and knowledgeable user base. Often times whenever I find something I wish I could do I inevitably find out how in the communities or it ends up being in the next month's release. There is an option to submit a ticket to Microsoft in the traditional support way but I have never found myself having to do that.

Likelihood to Recommend

I have used a handful of BI tools and Power BI is hands down the best in my opinion. I use it for answering day to day questions and it really shines when you need to provide data to a wide audience and people want to look at it there own way. Power BI is not Excel though so if users are looking to do data manipulation on the consumer side then a BI tool is not what your are looking for.

Power BI great now and positioned well for the future

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI