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Power BI worth a look? YES!
Updated March 26, 2015

Power BI worth a look? YES!

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

Overall Satisfaction with Power BI For Office 365

I'm a Senior BI Consultant, and have been developing reports with various tools for many years. I started with Crystal Reports, then Hyperion (Brio) Interactive Reporting, Microsoft SSRS, and then Excel Power Pivot. Once I started developing Excel Power Pivot reports and analytical solutions, I was hooked. When the addition of the other Powers: Power Query, Power View, and Power MAPS, I can say I am one of the biggest evangelists of the Microsoft BI Stack out there, and no, I don't work for Microsoft. I don't often look for work developing Power BI Solutions, the work finds me, and I am always glad to work with a client that knows benefits of utilizing Excel to it's maximum capacity. I mean, everyone already has Excel, and finding resources to support what I've built once I move on to the next project is always fairly painless. I'm glad to leave a maintainable solution in the hands of my client, and Power BI is the only BI Development tool that does ETL, Data Models, Drag and Drop report building, Pivot Tables, and more in an environment that's well known.
  • Drag and drop report development
  • Flexibility with Power Views, Pivot Tables, ETL, and Data Modeling all in one
  • Price
  • Power View is still in the early stages, so customization of the look and feel is a bit limited.
It's more agile and less expensive in the long run for the majority of your analytic and reporting needs.
I will continue to recommend this suite to folks looking for a reporting and analytics solution, as I find in MOST cases, it's great at meeting almost every requirement I've been given by a multitude of clients across a range of industries. I've built Capacity Planning solutions that allowed end user input which was then submitted to SharePoint, Executive Dashboards, custom applications, simple analytical tools for teams to easily slice and dice data, and super simple reports as well as some very complicated ones. If you haven't seen the demos online, do a search, and see for yourself - this is a great BI suite! (I do not work for Microsoft, although I do consult out there from time to time. I do occasionally make a recommendation for a different BI reporting tool, but in general, find Excel can accomplish quite a bit for less money and in less time.)
If you already have Excel, you want Power BI.