Item: Microsoft Power BI
Rating: 9
Author: Luciana Montivero

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Power BI is used in my organization only in the analytics and biostatistics team, within the medical informatics department. We mainly use it to easily integrate our different databases information into a one-only report. As it's easy to use, it helps us deliver complex and clean metrics truly fast, and as we work in the health industry time is a big factor to take into account (especially during a pandemic).

Pros and Cons

It's an excellent tool to integrate tables from different databases into one report.
The visual indicators are mostly complete and easy to use.
You can edit/manage/transform your tables to do almost whatever you want.
The UX is clean and simple, but powerful enough to deliver great results.

When you get too many tables, it might get a bit slow, it would be great if it could be more performant.
There aren't as much statistic tools or add-ons as one would want. Now, you can only do descriptive analysis but if you wish to do statistical tests there aren't functions or integrations that help you easily do that.
Formatting of some elements is a bit limited.
Sharing a dynamic report is not as smooth as I would like (to do so you need to pay for a license for the visitor or give access to your information to Microsoft, which I legally can't do).
The integration with R is not as good as I would like, it has many issues with the imports and the versioning of R and its packages.

Return on Investment

Our time to deliver reports improved a lot comparing it with previous months.
We were able to find anomalies in our data faster, which makes the information more reliable.
The presentation of the information is cleaner than ever.

Alternatives Considered

MicroStrategy Analytics and Tableau Online

Even though Power BI is not the only tool we use, is the most powerful one! Its easiness to integrate information and directly import queries makes it super easy to set up and start using it. Also, it's much faster handling a lot of data compared to other products like microstrategy. Also, there are a lot of customizations you can do to your reports that really improve how you show your data.

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Microsoft Power BI again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Aqua Data Studio, RStudio, OneNote, FortiClient

Usability

I was really surprised by how easy to use Power BI was! It makes it so approachable you almost want to keep using it so you get to learn the deeper features. Also, the initial step you usually need to take when learning new software was really small so it motivates you to explore more and more of the tool.

Support Rating

I haven't needed to contact Microsoft Power BI's support team yet.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Power BI really addresses the goal of what it was meant to do. It has a powerful interface, an easy integration with most data sources, which makes it easy to just import some information and start playing with your data. If you want a fast, powerful data analytics tool or a control panel to show fast reports, this is the tool you need. You'll be amazed at how easy it is to add a SQL-powered data source, add some visualization tools, and then just try different things! It's a truly complete and intuitive tool that will help you take real advantage of all the information your company does.

Empower your data through Power BI!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI