Item: Microsoft Power BI
Rating: 8
Author: Dustin Ghia

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used [Microsoft] Power BI Desktop with the Power BI Service on the cloud as a component of IT solutions for businesses and organizations[.] The main use of [Microsoft] Power BI is to create reports and share them on the web for embedding in websites and applications. The more advanced uses of [Microsoft] Power BI, like analytics for example, are less required by companies.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Nice graphic reports
Sharing reports on the web to be embedded with iFrames
Friendly interface and simple steps to make a report and publish it on Power BI Service on the cloud
Easy and simple integration with Microsoft Ecosystem

Cons

Shared web reports (to external users via iFrame) are not really responsive, they can just resize automatically
The integration with Azure is tricky to achieve some configurations (for example, security settings)
Power Query is a waste of time and can be replaced by database queries and procedures

Return on Investment

With [Microsoft] Power BI you can create and publish very cool reports from scratch in just a few minutes, and that's very important to the client.
[Microsoft] Power BI Pro can be used in the most of the projects and companies with a very little annual budget.
With the trial version you can create powerful demos and make effective pre-sales.

Alternatives Considered

Pentaho and Tableau Desktop

[Microsoft] Power BI is practical and effective, like a hammer for a nail, it is easy to use and produces very quickly the results that in most cases are urgently required by clients (nice reports to share on the web). To start using [Microsoft] Power BI you need a business email address, with that you create an account in Power BI Service and in less than 1 hour you will have installed Power BI Desktop, a report will have been created and it will have been published on the web .

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

ArcGIS, Talend Open Studio, Talend Data Integration, Elasticsearch, Kibana

Usability

Installing, configuring and using [Microsoft] Power BI is really easy, perfectly possible for users with basic IT knowledge; however, some concepts are indispensable and without them it might appear that Power BI is less usable than it actually is.
[Microsoft] Power BI is perfect for those who know something about databases, as it is an intuitive tool with which a lot of value can be generated from data.
[Microsoft] Power BI and no similar tool will be easy for an executive who has little knowledge or interest in information technologies.

Support Rating

Microsoft's support is standard, and typically the difficulties that arise when using Power BI correspond to managing Azure. Regarding the use of Power BI to do reports and analysis, the support of Microsoft is regular; However, the Power BI Users Community is active and frequently publishes manuals and tutorials on YouTube, with which practically all doubts regarding the basic and intermediate use of the tool can be resolved.

Likelihood to Recommend

[Microsoft] Power BI is very useful to make cool reports from the scratch with just a little of knowledge, gathering data from a lot of sources.
Power Query is not the most efficient tool to prepare data neither to analyze it. Power Query language is very complex an the final result can easily be achieved using standard SQL [when] working on a database source, or using other tools like [Python] with Elastic Search.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

Comments

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Useful and effective tool and at a very good price

Software Version