Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We use this solution for dashboards and reporting.

We work in manufacturing and we track any incidents that we have regarding safety.

The most valuable feature of this solution is real-time report tracking. For example, we have a report for a human body and the human body is populated with injury data. In real-time, we can see where most of the injuries have occurred. 

It is a difficult tool to use and it's hard to figure it out.

It's not user-friendly; more tutorials, training, and better documentation would be helpful.

I have been using Microsoft BI for three months.

We are running the latest version.

I don't have any issues with the stability of Microsoft BI. It's a stable solution.

It's mainly used by developers. We have 10 to 20 developers who are using this solution in our organization.

Technical support could be improved. If you are able to get someone it's great, but if you don't then you are left hanging. 

Previously, they were using BusinessObjects.

With the EA agreement, we get access to everything from Microsoft. It just made sense to switch.

The initial setup was completed through our internal Microsoft team.

Licensing costs are on an annual basis. There are no fees in addition to the licensing.

For anyone who is interested in using this solution, they should hire a dedicated Microsoft team to implement it, and get a lot of training.

I don't know it well but I would rate it a five out of ten.

We're a retail hospitality chain spread throughout India, operating over 330 outlets across the country in various formats, ranging from a coffee chain to fast food restaurants through our in-house bespoke brands. All these brands run out of travel hubs like airports, railway stations, and highways stops. We needed a solution to manage both the multiple SKU levels and in terms of individual dynamics, the profitability of each store. We constantly track the various types of back-end raw materials, specifically on our prediction modeling where we use Power BI. We also use Power BI analytics to drive those results with regard to the day-to-day dashboarding, reporting in terms of collection, on sales trends per hour, manpower and the like. We are customers of Microsoft and I'm the CIO. 

I like that the interface is very fluid in the sense that you can upload via Excel or you can attach via connectors, any software you like.

The challenge of this product is in truncating the table data. It would be great if Microsoft would include a naming convention which has the advantage of enabling a VLOOKUP on top of it, so two tables can be merged more seamlessly. Currently, the time it takes to merge two tables in Power BI makes the entire analysis quite complex because it requires common numbering in one table and then creating another common indicator in another table in order to merge the two. It wastes precious time. 

Secondly, while they talk about visual analytics, sometimes the challenge is when you're looking for more in terms of geovisual analytics, such as city maps which requires a functionality whereby you can upload transactions. For example, if I want to visually present my data on an airport map, showing which stores are generating what revenue dependent on the traffic heat map, I am unable to do that because I cannot upload drawings. Ideally, I'd like to show each store as a bar map with waves explaining the sales in each location. It allows me to pinpoint which locations are more profitable. 

I'd like to see a degree of variability so I have the flexibility of putting those variable components in my predictive modeling, and I can get a feel for the trends. It requires a common input database. You can do it in Excel, but you can't do it in Power BI, which I find surprising.

We've been using this solution for nine months. 

The product is fairly stable, it doesn't get too many upgrades or updates from that perspective so it's fairly straightforward in terms of implementation and our entire ecosystem was on Microsoft which helped us. The only area that can be problematic is when you're trying to create relationships between two databases and you're trying to link it with your Power BI solution, sometimes that mapping takes considerable time.

The solution is scalable. We are a cluster of eight legal entities and we've been able to expand to all of them. We started with 20 outlets and today we have 350 outlets. We are more granular and today Power BI allows us to drill down to the last voucher. We have around 14 users from the finance and operations teams.

We haven't needed to call Microsoft, because we worked with one of their gold partners in India. So we are on an AMC model with them in terms of manpower. If there are any problems or upgrades we need, we reach out to the partner. 

The initial setup was straightforward for the simple reason that our entire ecosystem was on Microsoft and we use Azure Web Services in terms of hosting. We split the entire project into two parts to simplify things. The first part was more about the granular analysis of sales and various other elements, which took considerable time due to the many external stakeholders involved. Phase two was relatively simple, because it was department specific and we created a split team, which led to the creation of a better platform.

Licensing is on an annual basis. We have a complete Microsoft Ecosystem license. I think there is room for improvement with the licensing, specifically during the pandemic when it would have been reasonable to offer a discount. Many other companies, SAP and Oracle, for example, gave waivers to the MSME sector. Microsoft traditionally is used by smaller or medium-sized companies so I was expecting some sort of discount on the pricing, but unfortunately that didn't happen. We managed to avoid an escalation in cost, but frankly speaking, a discount would have been much appreciated.

It's important to understand your entire ecosystem in terms of your tables; the kinds of tables your back-end database has and the elements of analysis that you are looking at. If you are looking at predictive modeling, you need to have at least two to three years of data, because that allows you to define the trajectory of the predictive modeling. Otherwise, it doesn't serve any purpose. Secondly, be very specific with your implementation partner, as to how you'd like a particular visualization tool to look, otherwise you may not get what you want. Finally, it's important to invest in people and create a center of excellence made up of people who know Power BI well, or who will get trained and certified on it. You'll need an in-house team which can do the small tweaks and changes as you require, otherwise you'll get stuck each time you need to do something.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We use it for reporting. We are using its latest version.

Its visualizations and dashboards are most valuable. Power BI is great in terms of visualizations and dashboards. The reports that we previously had were not very nice in terms of visualization. It also provides the ability to play with the data.

We have a lot of servers and applications from which we want reports, and it allows us to create reports from an SQL source or some other source.

They can improve it in terms of rule-based security. Currently, it has very limited rules.

They can improve the user interface a little bit to make it more user-friendly. When creating a dashboard, it is not very user-friendly. You have to click on a certain style and use your keyboard keys to move it. You cannot drag and drop it. 

Their technical support can be better. They normally take too long to escalate and resolve a case.

I have been working with Power BI for five or six months.

I am at the initial stage of using it. We have just deployed a report in our organization, and it is working fine so far. It seems to be stable. I am not sure if we faced any issues with it.

It is good in terms of scalability.

I have had only one interaction with them, and it was a bad one. They took around a month to resolve a simple issue. We also had to escalate the case. The resolution was very simple, and ideally, they should have found it on the first day. They normally take too long when it comes to the escalation of cases.

As a first-time user, I found it to be of medium complexity. You have to connect it with the SQL database or your data source. You might not find it very straightforward.

It can also be deployed on-premises. If you have it on-premises, make sure that you meet all the prerequisites and have all permissions. You should sort these things out before deploying Power BI. I faced some issues because I missed one of the prerequisites, and it took me one month to get it resolved. That's why I recommend completing all prerequisites.

I would rate Microsoft Power BI a seven out of ten.

One of our primary use cases is to build an MSBA-based business intelligence solution for  collection agents, so that they can receive daily information relating to bills in the form of ledgers. I've built several packages to import the data from where it has been dumped. I then created the data mask for data analysis to showcase all the outputs and conclusions. As a result, there is a clear breakdown of total collections, the different parameters, customer-based information, and other essential information. We are partners of Microsoft BI and I'm a solutions architect.

The solution has helped increase the client's total sales revenue for their collection agent. It's basically MSBA, plus an AIML kind of solution and it helps the client to increase the overall efficiency of their collection agents, increasing total revenue for the company. 

The most valuable feature is the data flow related to the container and the control flow. Microsoft has recently introduced paginated reports in the status part. These are web-based and also mobile-based, depending upon the layout of the report. It can be easily printed in Word format as well as in layout format, regardless of size. 

There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution and there are certain features that Microsoft should include in the MSBA solution. One is the connective level problem that we currently face from the different data sources. It provides about 80% connectivity to all the data sources, but there is the remaining 20%. They could provide some kind of additional functionality which would make it a great solution. 

I've been using this solution for about 18 months. 

The solution is pretty stable in its current form, and we are working on the same platform to optimize and incorporate everything. 

This solution is fully configurable and totally scalable. We are currently expanding the solution to include the area collections managers, the territory collection managers, and the regional collection managers. There are currently close to 3,000 users who are field collection agents. There is a maintenance cost but it's pretty low because it's an on-premise solution, so there is no cost attached to the server-based maintenance. Our support team is responsible for maintenance.

The solution is currently used throughout the company although there are geographical restrictions. They plan to extend usage to a pan-country level. It will take some time to implement but we are at the end stages of deployment on the pan-country level. Once completed, we expect there will be around 15,000 users. 

We provide technical support as required by our clients. Urgent issues can be resolved within two or three hours. 

Microsoft BI is similar to Talent and Pentaho BI but Microsoft is more competitive and flexible over the other BI solutions. We can cover up or build our end-to-end solution from scratch and that includes reporting and we don't need to go to any kind of a visualization tool for that.

The initial setup was complex because the data vault was not totally structured and we needed to create some kind of a data lake, dump the data, then analyze it and create the data mask. We require certain validations and checks before importing or exporting the data as well as the application of the cubes to SSRS before reporting services. Deployment time can be dependent on the server and we have designed the system to optimize the process. We have a deployment team which can include two to three developers. Deployment takes about 10 minutes. The client decides on the deployment plan because they have applications that hang on the production server and don't want deployment to hamper other applications. 

Microsoft BI is provided as a BI solution to incorporate or implement all data in a single platform. It enables you to build a data mart for your company and analyze it on a single platform. Even data analysis techniques can be carried out on this platform, and output of data can be visualized from the SSRS reporting tool. In this solution, the ROI is quite high because collection has increased up to 25% in one month compared to the same month last year.

We have used a client-based service in the pricing. As yet, there are no additional costs. 

For anyone interested in building a BI solution from scratch, it's important to be aware that the data is not taken at a single platform. I believe that Microsoft BI is the best platform for this because it gives the flexibility to store the data into an SQL Server from different sources, and the ability to first dump your data into those servers. The analysis and reporting is in the same platform. Power BI has a much greater range than SSRS. Microsoft BI is a tool that gives it to you on a single platform, and you can build an end-to-end BI solution. This is not possible in Power BI. 

This solution gives me the total flexibility to use my skill set, in the technical forms and in the analysis form, in one go. I can do several things on a single platform regarding the data science, as well as the data analysis, pulling information, analyzing data, transforming data, creating data lakes, data warehouse, and data masks, all in a single platform. 

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

There are multiple use cases. I can't count them even on my fingers. There are around 20 to 30 solutions we have been deploying. We use it across finance, procurement, HR, engineering, and whatnot. Each of the domains we have touched. Data visualization is the main need of any organization. With Microsoft being in our ecosystem, Power BI works perfectly well for us.

The solution overall works quite well, especially if you have a Microsoft-heavy ecosystem.

The ease of creating the dashboard is quite good. 

The analytics are very strong when we couple it with Azure. It offers very good Big Data Analytics that work perfectly well. 

Scalability is not at all a problem. 

You can perform the role-based access perfectly. It gives you everything you need with a single sign-on authentication due to the fact that we are in the Microsoft environment.

You don't have to worry about security. That is very robust.

What matters most is the turnaround time to create a solution, which is quite fast. This is due to the fact that it's quite intuitive in nature. Even those new to the solution can create solutions very quickly. There isn't a high learning curve.

The initial setup was not difficult.

The pricing has been pretty good. 

Technical support is quite responsive.

Overall, the solution is quite intuitive.

If I compare it to Tableau, I'd say the visualizations can be better. We should have multiple options. By that I mean, while there are multiple options for the visualization, the look and feel of the dashboard when you compare to Tableau is on the lower side. Tableau has a much better visualization.

We've been using the solution for three and a half years at this point. We've definitely used it over the last 12 months.

The product is quite stable. It works well in the Microsoft environment. It doesn't crash or freeze. there are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The solution scales very well. If a company needs to expand its offering, it can do so easily. It's one of the selling points of the solution.

We have about 60 to 70 people on the solution currently.

We already are deployed it at a global level. It's just not India-based. We use it across our organization, and it is getting used a lot.

We've dealt directly with technical support. They have been responsive. We have called them multiple times and the response was good. We are quite satisfied with the level of service.

The initial setup was okay. We didn't have any problems. I wouldn't call it complex. I'd describe it more as straightforward. It took us around three or four months to set up and deploy the solution.

We have a yearly contract. We signed up for three years and that rolls over annually.

We have a bundle, an enterprise-level package. Its pricing is good for us.

We did evaluate Tableau for a moment, however, due to the existing license of Microsoft, the default choice was Power BI.

We are using the latest version of the solution. I can't recall the exact version number.

It's one of the leaders in the top data visualization and analytics toolsets. I'd advise other companies to go for it. It's stable, scalable, and a powerful product and it comes very handy when you want to create visualizations very fast. It's a go-to product if you want to go for data visualization and reporting.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I am using the solution for data analytics.

I have found the best features to be the dashboard creation, graphs, charts, and presentation bar graphs. As for now, I am able to do a lot of operations but not with much proficiency. I am just getting started with it. I am not very good at doing dashboard creation or writing reports but sometimes I do it during office hours to understand and learn the analytical tools.

I have been doing trial and error to figuring out how to do the data analyzing and modeling. There could be some improvement to simplify it.

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

I am only working with small datasets at the moment and the solution has been stable. I am not sure how it will be for larger datasets. We have approximately 50 people using the solution in my organization.

This solution came free, it was offered by Microsoft with our E3 license.

This solution is a useful tool for the business and experts. It has plenty of features. I do not have a lot of advice because I am just starting to explore the solution but I have found it very helpful in terms of data presentation. 

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

It is used for data visualization and analytics. We have its latest version.

It has provided better and deeper analytics for our data. It has also been helpful for custom visualizations as per client requirements.

Reports, dashboards, and visualizations are most valuable.

It should have more report outputs. They should expand the report outputs.

Its documentation should also be better.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is fairly stable.

It is scalable based on licensing. You would need premium and additional organizational licenses. Mostly everyone in the organization uses this feature. We have around 4,000 users of this solution in our organization, which includes a lot of project management people.

We don't have any plans to increase the usage in the future. We are currently content with its usage.

They exceed expectations and provide good quality support.

We had other solutions, but they were some form of ad hoc databases and spreadsheets. We switched to this solution for integrating various data sets from different data sources and for richer analytics.

It was straightforward. It took two weeks.

It was an in-house job. For its maintenance, we probably have a staff of about 20 people.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten. It is a really well-developed product, but it has some room for improvement.

It is good for us for onboarding the data. We can connect to multiple data sources, do transformations to make the data usable, and then model it within the transformation.

Someone who has come from a Microsoft Excel environment will easily be able to use this solution. Power query and report modeling are easy to understand in this solution.

Their technical support is very good. They are extremely responsive, helpful, and hands-on.

The visual outlet or the visualization aspect can be improved because the settings piece is quite problematic. It requires a lot of time to set the visuals and check. It is quite fiddly to change all the settings and font sizes. It just needs better ability in terms of using templates or visualization templates to get the vision. Our users always benchmark based on the product, and they don't appreciate everything under the bonnet. The only rating is based on the actual reports in the settings for the dashboard. They should make it look a bit funky and a bit more aesthetically pleasing on the eye. It is quite a fiddly tool, but other than that, it is pretty slick. 

Because it is community-driven, the marketplace tends to be changing forever. You get the standard visualizations, and you've also got all other marketplace visualizations that require you to spend a bit more money and purchase things in the marketplace. With certain visualizations, there is no longevity. I had used certain visualizations, but they discontinued them, and I had to rebuild my reports, which is obviously very frustrating. There should be some sort of stabilization around how the marketplace visuals impact the users when they expire.

I have been using this solution for about two and a half years. We use Power BI Premium, and we have its latest version.

It is scalable once you've got your ducks in a row. We live in a world of fast-paced data. The business I am working in is dealing with a lot of unstructured data, so it has to go through the data onboarding transformation piece. It is more scalable if it connects to a data warehouse, but connecting to an Excel spreadsheet or unstructured data requires enormous amounts of investment. I have seen some other tools that are more data wrangling tools, so you don't want to blur your line. You need to stick to what you're good at. Is it data visualization and modeling, or is it data transformation? They're trying to diversify and make the tool all-encompassing, but we're now having to use a different tool for data transformation or data wrangling. We then just connect it to a data warehouse, and it becomes a really slick and scalable tool.

They are very good. They are extremely responsive and helpful. They arrange a call quite quickly, and they actually get on the call and help you and do troubleshooting with you. They are not sending you to the Q&A page. They are quite hands-on in terms of support. So, I am really happy with their support.

I would advise others to just make sure that whatever you're going to deploy can be scaled out. You should get your data modeling in place first. 

I would recommend this solution. They have so many releases every month, which is quite cool. They are keeping on top of it, and it is not like you have to wait six months for a release. I'm still trying to keep up with the releases of the last four or five months.

I would rate Power BI a nine out of ten.