Powerful, easy to use, no-nonsense visualization
January 15, 2019

Powerful, easy to use, no-nonsense visualization

Jeremiah Miller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Power BI For Office 365

Power BI is being used primarily by our donor relations team to create visual dashboards of giving profiles, linked with other data sources. This helps us to easily spot trends in donors and gifts, linked to location and other anonymous demographic data. It is a powerful but easy to use visualization tool for modeling data.

Pros

  • Data visualization - it's easy for users to visualize data using many built-in controls.
  • Distributing reports and dashboards and delivering in real time on the web. Reports can be updated in real-time and display updated results automatically to decision makers.
  • Pulling data from diverse data sources. Data can be pulled from a wide variety of databases, even flat-file text.

Cons

  • Power BI is not a classic reporting tool, so it can't easily be used for financial reports.
  • It can be quite expensive. Even those just viewing reports need a paid license to consume shared content.
  • Error logging is very unhelpful. When something goes wrong with a dataset, it can be very difficult to see where the problem is.
One main competitor of Power BI is Tableau. Tableau has been around longer than Power BI so it can feel a little more refined in areas, however Power BI is catching up quickly. Tableau can be more expensive than Power BI. If you want more features and more refinement, and don't mind extra cost, then Tableau may be a better choice. But if you want something that's integrated with many things in O365, and are satisfied with fewer bells and whistles, Power BI may be the better option.
If you're already using Office 365, Power BI for O365 is an easy choice. Start playing around with the free version and then easily add individual Pro licenses with little risk. However, if you anticipate using this with many users, it can get expensive quickly.

Power BI For Office 365 (discontinued) Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.5
Pixel Perfect reports
7
Customizable dashboards
8
8.0
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
10
9.5
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
9
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
9.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
8
9.3
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
8.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
9
Mobile Application
8
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
7
6.0
REST API
6

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