Microsoft Power BI - a solid choice for data visualization and a great add to the Microsoft Suite
April 27, 2021

Microsoft Power BI - a solid choice for data visualization and a great add to the Microsoft Suite

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

Software Version

Power BI Pro

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

We currently use Microsoft Power BI across our whole organization to for visualization and trending of product data. It addresses the need for automated dashboarding of data and the ability to quickly filter and access trends that are occurring without the need to manually query and plot the data by interested individuals.
  • Nice dashboarding capabilities.
  • Can integrate well with other Microsoft products.
  • Calculated fields.
  • Connectivity to data sources.
  • Some small bugs/constraints on how data visualization components.
  • Some components of Power BI dashboards are a bit clunky and outdated.
  • Iterating/versioning of dashboards not seamless.
  • Went from hours to mins for plotting retrieved data.
  • Filtering decreased time required to query data.
  • Takes time to onboard users to dashboards.
MS Power BI is a bit more rigid than Tableau in terms of dynamic visualizations, but we chose it because we were already using the MS ecosystem. In terms of sharing and integrating with our MS Suite, MS Power BI was better in terms of licensing and integrations with our current suite of tools and how we access those tools.

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

Overall MS Power BI is easy to use, although there is a learning curve in terms of setting up a dashboard, but in terms of users using the dashboard and being able to trend the data appropriately, it's fairly intuitive. Also easy to give users access and fairly straightforward to connect to data sources and set up data refresh. The only downsides to usability is that there are some constraints with the type of visualizations and how they need to be laid out in the dashboards.
Haven't used the support team a lot, but the time I reached out with a query, the response was timely and they were able to let us know that the feature we were looking for did not exist currently but may exist in a future release which helped us to move on.
Well suited to scenarios where you're connecting to data sources such as MS SQL Server and need to be able to automate the display of data under a common set of repeatable filters and plots. Also great for organizations already within the MS ecosystem since you can integrate with MS Teams, etc.
Less well suited if you need more flexibility and dynamic changes around your visualizations. MS Power BI dashboards are more rigid and less suitable for cases where you want to use the dashboard to dynamically drill into your data and slice it multiple ways quickly.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
8
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
8
Report sharing and collaboration
9
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
9
Report Versioning
7
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
7
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
9
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9
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