Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I am currently a management consultant and, before my current employment, I was a management consultant as well. I also had a stint with an online retailer in India. My usage with Power BI has been in the area of practical day-to-day operations, web host operations, and equipment status monitoring.

Two valuable most features are the ability to create columns and create measures.

The create measures feature offers you a little bit more flexibility. You can define what kind of measure you need using a formula, and the way Power BI works is very similar to Excel. In fact, most of the functions that you use in Excel are present in Power BI as well. When you create measures or columns, you just write the formula as you would in Excel, which will allow you to visualize that data in the way that you want.

In my opinion, the software is a little bit limited in terms of the flexibility it offers, with regard to the design of the visualization. By comparison, if you look at some other visualization tools, such as Tableau, for instance, the range of designs, or the range of graphics that you can create with Tableau is far greater than what you can do with Power BI. 

Of course, they do provide an option to download templates and use them, but every time, you have to go to the Power BI store, search for those templates, download them and then use them. I think it's a growing universe of visualizers that they have, so probably, they are also working on the same thing. I believe, in terms of the designs of the visualizations that the tool can create, there is some room for improvement.

One more aspect that needs improvement is the formatting of visualizations that we create. Formatting in this context is the colors or the font style or font sizes. The formatting options, I believe, could be made a bit more user-friendly than the way things are right now. It's a little hard to figure out where to go and how to change the formatting of a particular chart or graph. So, I think the formatting options could be made a little bit more user-friendly.

I have been using Power BI for more than three years.

Microsoft BI is definitely stable.

This product is scalable and in fact, I have worked on it with fairly large datasets. It also gives you the option of publishing onto a server. When the dashboard/report is published to the Power BI server, we get a link that can be shared with others in the organization. At the enterprise level, it is possible to give access to a list of users who will have a need to look at the report frequently. These users can just click on the link and view the report whenever they want to. It is also possible for them to use filters and interact with the report.

I am fairly comfortable with the tool and to this point, I really haven't felt the need to reach out to Microsoft with regard to the specific features of the tool. In case I do need some help on a particular feature, what I usually do is Google what I am trying to find and I get some links to the Microsoft community, or something similar, which answers my question.

To that extent, it has been very convenient to find help in whatever we are required to do with the software. The simple things are taken care of automatically. In case there is some trouble with the visualizations, you can always find help or assistance on the Microsoft community pages.

I have also worked with Tableau and I think that each of these tools has its advantages.

I believe the cost of the software plays a deciding factor in a company's decision to implement either of the two. While each product has its pros and cons, if you're looking for something that's more value for money, then I think Power BI is the better choice.

On the other hand, if you are willing to choose an expensive option that gives you a lot more flexibility, then I think that Tableau would be a better choice.

It ultimately depends on what you are going to use it for. If you're using it for a variety of visualizations that you want to create, Tableau will be a better choice. On the other hand, if people have budget constraints then Power BI will provide a good value for the money.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just download the software from their website, install it, and sign in.

This product offers good value for the money.

In a nutshell, I recommend this product and I would suggest implementing it. It has a very good range of features that it offers. For organizations starting on their business intelligence journey, I believe Power BI is a very good tool to start with. It's very user-friendly and it provides a graphical user interface where users can just drag and drop their required fields into particular templates of visualizations. It means that you get the charts quickly. There's no complex learning curve involved. From that perspective, I would say that it's definitely worth a try.

My biggest complaint is that it's a bit limited right now, in terms of the choice of visualizations it offers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Microsoft BI for the visualization of data. We also hope to use it for machine learning as it's very powerful, but at the moment, we are trying to get authorized for reporting and analysis.

It's similar to Excel, but it's much more powerful than Excel. I love the unlimited number of rows that can be processed, the grant server application, and the strong security.

It produces a very nice picture — very nice graph managers that are very attractive.

The way you prepare your reports is very intelligent and intuitive. 

It's very easy to operate and the dashboard is great.

I have been using this solution for a few months now.

Microsoft BI is stable, but I cannot comment on the stability as we haven't yet used it for a big project.

The customer support is excellent. We get perfect support and it is regional — not only in our country, but there is also regional representation from Microsoft's so-called architects; they are very good professionals who help us with whatever we require.

Currently, we are in process of implementing this solution on my computer. I installed the Microsoft Power BI desktop application very easily and started my training. I didn't experience any difficulties.

I collected information from several sources and it's been working well — I am happy with this software.

I needed about 15 minutes to install the desktop application. The other portion is web-based, so I haven't gotten to that yet.

Microsoft BI is not very cheap. A premium license costs roughly 5,000 euros a month.

I would absolutely recommend this solution to other interested companies.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft BI a rating of eight.

The solution is stable.

It's a pretty scalable product.

Overall it's a good product. It is still rather new, therefore, for now, it's still a learning curve as we get used to all of the features and capabilities.

The charting tool could be improved.

The product could have better analytics capabilities.

The initial setup is not straightforward.

I've been using the solution for five months.

The solution is quite stable. I'd call it reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze and I can't recall bugs or glitches happening.

The solution is scalable. If your organization needs to expand it, it shouldn't be a problem to do so.

We have about five people on the solution, however, we don't have it fully functioning just yet.

I did not use a different solution previously before the implementation of this product. This is the first solution we've used for these purposes.

The initial setup is pretty complex. It's not straightforward or simple. You need to be a bit of an expert in order to handle it, and I am, unfortunately, not an expert. If you had more experience with it, you might find it easier than I did.

I was not involved in the pricing or procurement process of the solution. I'm not sure how licensing works of the overall cost of the solution on a monthly or yearly basis. It's not part of my day-to-day.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Microsoft.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using. It may be the latest.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at an eight. We've been pretty happy with it, even though it is quite new to us.

We primarily use Power BI for data science solutions.

This is a self-service BI tool, so it doesn't require a huge amount of technical training, knowledge, or a background in BI in order to induct new people into it. This is true even for business people who want to do a little bit of self-service. The whole thing has become quite simplified, as compared to what it was.

There are many good features in this product.

The most valuable features are a combination of the DAX and the inquiry capability, plus the visual gallery that we have. I think that these three things, or the combination of them, is the best that we have found.

I would like to have the capability to schedule exports in different versions. For example, if I want to schedule a subscription and attach an Excel file, we don't have this capability right now. A lot of people work on Excel, so being able to export an Excel file as part of a subscription would be an improvement.

We have been working with Power BI for more than five years.

Overall, it is pretty stable. The cloud version is definitely very stable, and I have found very few flaws or areas for improvement. We have been using it for more than five years and we have every intention to continue with it.

It has been pretty nice for us, in terms of scalability. There hasn't really been a problem, as such. We have approximately 300 users.

Technical support from Microsoft gets a big thumbs up from me. They have blogs, a support page, and the community is very active. Most of the answers we need, we find them there. 

With this amount of information available, we don't need to use technical support extensively. When we do post something on the blog or in the community, the response that we get is pretty prompt.

The last time we utilized technical support was when we were investigating creating a subscription with an Excel file attached to it. We found out that it isn't yet possible with the current version.

The initial setup is straightforward, to say that least. It took just a few days to deploy.

The pricing is very reasonable compared to any other tool.

My advice for anybody who is considering this tool is that if you want to move to a self-service BI, this is probably the best tool available right now. The self-service is pretty good in terms of os user acceptance, usage, and simplicity. It is something that everybody wants and Power BI does really well in that area.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Power BI is that if the data is not according to what you want, that really isn't a problem. It has been a problem in the past, especially where the data is not in the form or the shape that you need, but with Power BI, that problem can be solved very easily.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to analyze financial statements from our partners.

We build dashboards to see information on a product that is offered by one of our local telcos.

The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members. If you want to build a dashboard then you can publish it to the cloud, and then add people. This will give them access to the dashboard where they can review it, and modify it as well.

They have a mobile option that allows you to see the dashboard from your mobile phone, rather than having to look at your laptop.

I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited.

I would like to see an option for adding audio to the visualizations. 

They need to add support for putting emojis into the dashboards.

We have been using Power BI for the past two or three years.

In terms of stability, this product has never failed me. I have not experienced any bugs or glitches.

The scalability is good. They allow for multiple types of data sources, so if you grow your databases or you change your data sources, it's easy to add them to the tool visually.

We are a startup with four people, and everybody is using it. We are proposing it to our clients in cases where we are selling analytics because it's a good option for them.

I have not had a reason to speak with technical support, although I've looked at the community. They do have additional features that you can download from the site, as well. I have not a problem in terms of support.

I used Tableau in 2016, but I decided not to use it in this startup company because they don't have a free option. They do have a trial version, but that expires and I would have to then look for another solution.

With Microsoft BI, they have a free desktop version. 

I have also used Cognos BI before, although it was a bit complicated. This is another reason that I settled on Microsoft BI.

The installation is direct and quite easy to do. The instructions are available online and they are easy to follow.`

I completed the deployment myself.

We are using the free desktop version of this product.

Once the trial period for the BI service is over, the cost is approximately $10 USD per user, per month, so it's quite reasonable.

My advice for anybody interested in using Microsoft BI is to set up the desktop version. It's good to start off with, it's easy to learn, and they get the trial period for the BI service. Then, once they're done with the trial period, I think the licensing per month is quite affordable.

In summary, this is a good solution. It is not perfect, although if they added audio, emojis, and more types of graphs, then it would be.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. 

I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use.

A few features available in Tableau are not available in Power BI. For example. Tableau has the ability to make up the physical layer and all other stuff at runtime. In Power BI, we have to develop a proper physical layer to connect it.

The limitation that we normally face is related to the direct query mode. When it comes to the direct query mode, most of the functionality is not working, which is an issue for us. We have to use the direct query mode frequently because the client needs real-time data. They should work on this limitation.

There are a lot of other technical things that need to be improved. I am also following the Power BI platform and Microsoft Support Center platform on the web where users have put their requirements. Microsoft is also working on improving this solution. In every update, they add new features to this solution.

I have been using this solution for more than four years.

It is stable. I haven't found it hanging. It consumes a lot of memory on the local system but not while developing the reports. It also depends on the data on which we are working, but generally, it is light and stable.

My overall experience with Microsoft is actually quite good. We have contacted their technical support once or twice. It was something related to the Power BI visualization, where we needed to visualize some data, but they had some kind of limitation in personalization. We also wanted to connect Power BI with other servers, but we were facing some performance issues. The reports were not working fine. I don't think they managed to solve our issues.

I have worked on SiteSense and Oracle OBIEE. I feel more satisfied when I'm working with Power BI. It is more convenient as compared to other solutions.

The initial setup is easy. I didn't find any complexity in it. It can be difficult if the end users don't know how to use it. If they are trained on it, then after a week or a month, it gets easier for the end users. 

Its cost seems to be unreasonable if you have many users, but for a lesser number of users, it is reasonable. It is $10 per month. Clients easily accept this option, so they must think it is reasonable. 

It is quite cheap as compared to other tools, such as Tableau. One of the best things about this solution is that it has a trial version.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

It is mostly used for monthly cost reports for our department. We are also using it as a dashboard for giving some overview for management purposes. We are using the latest version.

Its seamless integration with Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Excel, is the most valuable.

They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. 

They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use.

I have been using Microsoft BI for almost two and a half years.

Stability is quite good as long as you have proper sizing from the beginnings. If you do the right sizing keeping in mind the current usage as well as future growth, it is good.

It is scalable. We have around 65 seniors managers who use it on a weekly or monthly basis. Some reports are done weekly and some monthly.

I have not contacted them so far. I am from the user side. We contact our centralized IT department for any issues. If they have a technical issue that requires further escalation, they will directly contact Microsoft technical support.

The initial setup is quite simple, but for the product use, you need to have people who have got experience of at least three to six months in using these applications. It took us two months to deploy across the company.

We have a core team that gets training from a Microsoft partner. We then deploy it ourselves. After six months of using this solution, some of the key users get advanced training. 

We also maintain it ourselves. We have around ten people for its maintenance.

It is somewhere in the middle in terms of price. Licensing is quite clear.

We reviewed some other intelligence tools, and we just used them for trials.

I would recommend this solution, especially for the companies that mostly use Microsoft products and ecosystem. I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

Daily updated production indicators dashboard: We get production data (Number of pieces, downtime, and downtime reasons) from the shopfloor and input them on an Excel sheet. 

PowerBi is used to import our production data and generate dashboards, then integrates other Excel sheets to provide managers dashboards. This helps them get insights to make better OEE improvement decisions, mainly where to focus resources. We became able to see indicators from any time frame (day, week, month, or year), then could make better decisions.

With this solution, we were able to know which problems were critical and chronic. Once we used Power BI for production management, we realized that we could also use it for quality assurance, finance, and others types of management.

Interactive graphs are its most valuable feature.

Real-time updating needs improvement.

Two years.