Almost there
Updated November 04, 2014
Almost there
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
2013
Modules Used
- Power BI app for Windows 8
- Sharepoint 2013 Online
- Excel 2013
Overall Satisfaction with Power BI For Office 365
In our organization, Power BI is used for ad-hoc data analysis and some regular reports, next to other BI tools. Only data analysts use it to compile reports that are easily viewed in Excel by non-Power BI users. It is the tool of choice for combining data from multiple sources.
- Ease of use. Most people have experience working with Excel. If you know how to create pivots, you can use Power BI.
- Data extraction and transformation (ETL). ETL is a joy with Power Query. It is intuitive, simple and a magical experience to transform poor data into something useful.
- Visuals. Power BI is beautiful to behold, especially Power View.
- Maps. The interactive maps are great built-in tools.
- Cost You cannot find anything cheaper than Power BI, unless you want to give it to every user in your company.
- Automatic updates. A choice of a daily or weekly refresh is too slow for this era of real-time updates.
- Speed. It takes a while to load all the data into memory. Data with more than one million records will take a few minutes to refresh. Once it is loaded, it starts being fairly fast.
- Changing queries in Power Query. Although Microsoft is working on it, when you delete a step in Power Query, you might have to rebuild your data model. This defeats the purpose of having a fantastic user interface, in which it is simple to change queries.
Tableau and Qlikview are both faster and have easier many-to-many relationships. However, for the average user, Power BI is much easier as a true Self-service BI. Besides, the cost for Power BI is lower.