Power BI is the microscope you never knew your data needed!
May 13, 2021

Power BI is the microscope you never knew your data needed!

Tanish Pruthi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Power BI Desktop

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

Power BI is categorically the most advanced yet beginner-friendly business intelligence tool that I have come across. Because of its beautiful, user-friendly interface, automated onboarding, and a dedicated website for tutorials, the learning curve is flattened as much as possible, which gets the user going in no time. Even if something gets overwhelming for you, you can hop to their friendly and helpful user community forum, which is invariably ready to help you with alacrity.

Pros

  • Using features like Power Query, which is in itself like a tool like Excel, you can clean and preview data before using it for analysis purposes. If you have used Excel in the past, Power Query will, for the most part, be a cakewalk for you.
  • The predominant feature one comes to Power BI is the ability to create automated formidable dashboards that everyone refers to before or during meetings to encourage and substantiate decision-making.
  • If required, based on specific data points, reports are triggered automatically to certain people as well.

Cons

  • Off the top of my head, I don't have many areas of improvement to suggest. I have experienced it improving day by day, adding and fixing features.
  • I have noticed that if you have data from many sources linked and a lot of data representing figures on the dashboard, it can feel a little bloated in terms of responsiveness. Inline data takes some time to pop up if you hover your mouse over a figure, and changing the data on any table/figure takes time to reflect on the other linked table/figures.
  • The earlier they match the functionalities between the online and offline versions, the better. I would like to have a seamless experience irrespective of the platform or environment.
  • It has allowed us to make sense of so much unused data that we had prematurely assumed was of no use and futile. Now we make sure all data is analyzed in some way or form.
  • Because of its user-friendly nature, every team has adopted it to fulfill their own analytical needs. Because of this, we have saved costs as we didn't have to hire a dedicated analytics team for data analysis needs.
  • As our SaaS platform doesn't have a strong in-built data analytics function, we create custom dashboards on Power BI and share them with our customers to fulfill their requirements and keep them content and retained.
Zoho Analytics is too complex-looking and unintuitive. It is not agile and takes a lot of time to load even basic tables and charts. It looks hideously archaic and insipid. Unlike Power BI, there are practically no online resources for one to learn the platform on their own. You will have to rely on countless demos from their sales executives.

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

At this point, I think we all know who has taken the lead in the business intelligence and analytics market worldwide. With fresh new updates every other day on top of an already robustly built product with all features that one can dream of is a no brainer, I feel. Microsoft will invariably be synonymous with quality and professionalism.
To be very frank, I have never contacted the support for any issues. As tutorials cover basically everything, I have never had to contact them for a doubt. And as Microsoft products have always been stable, I have never faced any nagging bug that forced me to reach out to their customer support.
From being able to import data from a plethora of sources and clean and establish relationships between them; create sublime real-time dashboards; to sharing them with your team members to collaborate, nothing can beat the comprehensive features of Power BI with the kind of aggressive pricing that they have set. The available charts and figures are so pleasing to the eyes that the resultant dashboard feels like a renaissance painting.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.7
Pixel Perfect reports
7
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
8
8.0
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
8
Report sharing and collaboration
8
8.2
Publish to Web
9
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
7
Delivery to Remote Servers
8
8.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
Predictive Analytics
8
8.3
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
8.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
7
Mobile Application
8
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9
7.7
REST API
8
Javascript API
8
iFrames
7
Java API
7
Themeable User Interface (UI)
7
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
9

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