Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We primarily use the solution for integrating into our ERP so people can have a dashboard analysis of whatever is important to analyze or compare, whether it be top-selling products or sales performance, or quota analysis.

Just as a BI tool, there's not much difference between solutions. It works well with our product and it's something that customers are familiar with and they often already have a lot of licensing with Microsoft. It's an easy add-on to their users.

There's generally a sense of familiarity with the product.

It integrates with all of the Microsoft tools.

It's not even fair for me to respond on that as that's not my wheelhouse. I don't know how easy it is as I'm not doing any of the designs. Therefore, I have not had any real training on it. I don't think that's fair for me to criticize anything that they're doing.

The initial setup is a little bit technical and what an end user wants to see is always a moving target.

The solution needs better technical support.

I've been using the solution for about three years at this point.

In terms of stability, we haven't had any challenges with it at this point. As with multiple integrations across several companies we tend to make whatever change is best for the biggest base of clients. We haven't had any issues thus far.

Technical and end user support is something that might be lacking from Microsoft. As a user when I want to find an answer to, "Hey, how do I do this?" I often get better answers by going to a  website of a company that represents them than I do going directly to their site.  Maybe they do that on purpose to help drive business to those people, however, it would be helpful if it was more centralized and the quick and simple steps answers that I get elsewhere.

I have some past experience with solutions such as Tableau and Cognose but not integrated into this ERP product.  We chose one that we would feel would be on a common platform of our customers.

The setup is fairly straightforward but implementation is a little bit complex mostly due to how the customer driven scope changes often as they realize the power of a BI tool and want to be able to expand it's use.

We're on a Progress platform, so that's a little more technical on our side at the beginning of the original project.

The licensing costs vary. It all depends on the individual customer due to the fact that Microsoft's options are modular. For example, they have Microsoft Office suite, then they add CRM and then you might add BI.  It's not expensive per user, however, as you increase the functionality or add different tools, it becomes more expensive.

We qualify as a partner as we're a software distributor. We're using the most current version of the solution.

Here is the biggest thing: when you look at any BI tool or if it's the first time you're implementing one, you can easily get over enticed by the flashy display or the common things. However, it's the ability to drill down to your true business processes that are going to make it or break it as being the right tool or accesses the right information. Somebody that gets a BI tool for the first time will open a dashboard and say, "Oh, that's important for me to see every day." However, the reality is, when using a dashboard view you're looking for a red flag or highlights. The power of the BI tool is allowing you to drill down to the data behind the dashboard, that's where the real testing comes in.  Figuring out where to get the information from and how best to analyze it.  That's my best BI tool advice. Anybody can make a dashboard look pretty. It has to be useful too.

In general, I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

This solution is primarily used for business analytics. We generate reports so that the business analytics team can use them for their analysis.

Previously, we used Excel to perform the analysis. It was very tedious for them to get data into Excel, do the refresh, and generate the reports. Now, using Microsoft BI, they can connect directly with the data, it gets refreshed automatically, and they don't have to worry about refreshing it.

They get the data in the report section and they don't have to worry about report generation, data modeling, and other aspects.

The most valuable feature is the reporting. It's easy to create reports and it's easy to download the data from the corresponding report.

This product enables self-service BI.

The paginated report functionality, which was intended to replace SPSS, is not yet up to the mark. We would like improvements made to the paginated reports so that it produces quality similarly to SSRS.

There is no automation for paginated reports, so then need to make it automated.

Ultimately, I would like to see all of the features from SSRS that are missing. That's ideally what I would like to have.

I have been using Microsoft BI for the past 10 years.

This product is pretty stable.

Scalability depends on the kind of reports and data we are looking at. It has multiple features for us based on the functionality and the requirement of the customer. It's not limited only to enterprise-specific customers. Rather,  It can be used by small, medium, as well as enterprise-based customers.

There is no limitation as such. So it's quite scalable.

I have work two different companies at this time, and as far as I know, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 people who use this product.

The quality of support depends on the Microsoft partner that you are working with. 

We have not faced any significant issues, but when we have, we raised a bug with the Microsoft technical team and they have resolved things accordingly.

This is the only tool that we are using for reporting. Previously, we used Crystal Reports.

We deployed this product ourselves. We used the documentation that is available at Microsoft.com.

The cost of licensing depends on the number of people that are going to be using the reports, and we are satisfied with it at $10 per user.

Our company focuses on Microsoft products, so we did not evaluate solutions by other vendors.

My advice is that if you are looking for an aggregated level of data, using it for reporting, then it's better to use Power BI because everything will be in memory and it will be much faster.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The dashboard features are really valuable, you can connect to multiple data points. Overall, the solution is easy to use.

The solution could be more customizable and you do not have enough freedom on the code.

I have used the solution for one year.

The install was straightforward and the advanced dashboards operate on well-branded tablets.

The premium licensing is approximately $5,000 per month which is pretty expensive.

If you are planning on implementing Microsoft BI, having experience with other Microsoft products will make using this solution easy and straightforward. 

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

We are a service provider and Microsoft BI is one of the tools that we implement for our clients. We do not use it ourselves.

My primary use case is integration, but it is also used for reporting and data analysis services.

The user interface is easy to work with.

More connections with other systems should be added, which would allow for other integrations.

I have been using Microsoft BI for between eight and nine months.

Microsoft BI is a stable product.

I do not have experience with technical support. In cases where I have found an issue, I Google it, spend time learning about the problem, and then resolve it.

I have also used Alteryx and Informatica. We still may use one of these other products, depending on our client's requirements. If the client wants us to work using a specific product then that is their choice.

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment will take an hour, or an hour and a half.

We deployed this product ourselves. It is easy to work on.

I primarily use Microsoft BI for integration, so it is difficult for me to say what needs to be improved. Overall, this is a good tool and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.

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.

Our primary use for this solution is geospatial analysis.

This solution has provided an accurate analysis of our customers repurchasing the same plan for telecom Jio. It has provided customer purchase patterns and great visualization.

The most valuable features are the visualization and integration with Office365.

This solution needs integration with SAS and more deep analysis functionality.

I have been using Microsoft BI for five years.

Our primary use is real-time & batch analytics on Postgres databases in combination with MS Excel.

This solution has improved our ability in making decisions and explaining data.

The most valuable features are the automation of analysis and already prepared tools to do the analytic work rapidly.

We would like to have better SQL support for queries. It means to have a kind of development environment trying to correct bad sintax in SQL query, or having an intellisense like style for code completion being aware of table's fields and having a preview of the query response without needing to run the whole procedure. 

We have been using Microsoft BI for two months.

Previously we used MS Excel but continue using it mainly for prototyping.

Power BI free layer is attractive and second stage with Power BI online is not expensive.

Tableau.