Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I have started a consulting business. So my use case is typically what my clients are doing. I've used it for healthcare analysis, headcount analysis, financial and performance analysis.

One thing it's doing in the early stage of an implementation is, it not only helps decision making, but it allows people to have insight into problems with data so that they can go and get it corrected.

The ability for business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person.

One thing I would like to have is the scripting language, as they already have within Excel. It's already within a Microsoft business product, because Excel is the number one business product out there. So it would be nice to have the scripting capability in order to automate certain processes.

It's not only stable but it's constantly improving. 

The scaling is dependent on the data source itself, so it's not dependent on the solution. SQL Server, which is one of the strongest enterprise databases, makes that a good thing.

We were previously using Excel, and Excel did not have the ability to deploy nor did it have the ability to easily do some of the things that people were asking for. The switch was driven by being overwhelmed in the Excel world.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• usability
• the ability to develop solutions in an agile fashion
• the ability to have power users on the business side able to do their own work.

It's very, very easy to get started. The complexity is the typical complexity in deployment, in that you have to have people make decisions on who has rights to what data. As far as the implementation, it's quite easy.

Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper.

The short list was really only Tableau and Microsoft, and frequently clients have Microsoft products already installed so they have the security, the Active Directory, as well as the use of Excel, and the use of the collaboration tools like O365.

I'd say that Microsoft and Tableau are both nine and a half out of 10, and it's per the requirements I already mentioned. They both are very high-quality, easy to use, stable, they both allow business users to do a level of development, and they're both highly deployable.

My advice to a colleague would be that they actually do short trials with each of the products they're considering and the check the vendors' support.

Consolidating data from multiple sources and providing dashboards to a broad set of users: Finance, Human Resources, Operations, and Leadership.

It allows individuals to do the analysis themselves. We are getting adoption beyond original expectations.

Most importantly, the dashboards. Recently, we are exploring vendor provided analysis/visuals and the use of R.

Drill-down in dashboards needs to improved. The capability only works in Power BI Desktop today. We need to have an alternative approach today.

• Enterprise reporting
• Enterprise BI
• Project reporting and BI
• Data integration
• Data collection
• Information management

• We are running over 500,000 report annually.
• It provides data feeds for enterprise KPI reporting.
• It provides data feeds for AI.

• Integration of DB and reporting
• Standardised SQL language
• Plenty of support
• Cloud options
• Continual improvement year-over-year

• The data source definition is all over the place. 
• It needs a wizard that covers all its options. 
• It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections.

It cuts away the time spent to source some of this information. It saves a lot of time, and a lot of things have been automated. Things that used to take close to a week, now, in one day, we are done with it.

It's actually the self-service of Power BI, because we're on a lean structure here, the technical side. So we wanted them to push some of those things back to end-users.

For our reporting services, it would be good to have the capability for email-based subscriptions. I want to be able to change the sender dynamically, without having to rely on running through an exercise passage.

I know for a fact that SAP can do this, dynamic sending for subscriptions. Also IBM Cognos can do it. Why Microsoft refused to do that, that you have to rely on add-on to be able to do that...

Overall, it has performed to our expectation. It's okay for what we want to use it for. But because they keep changing, every now and then, there's a major shift in versions, so we are trying to catch up.

I've used the IBM suite, and I've used SAP, and Microsoft is fairly stable for me. And because there is a large community for issues that arise, for every bug that you encounter, you have a solution, just Google it, without having to go for special training like with SAS.

From what I understand, it requires some level of expertise to even understand what it can do, how it can be used in a huge enterprise. That is not so easy for deployment. But for a medium sized organization, yes, it's scalable.

It was straightforward. Very straightforward.

You can just go to YouTube, somebody has done it before. Because it has GUI, just click, click, click, next, next, and you're done. And YouTube helped a lot in deploying projects: SSAS Projects, SSIS projects, and SSRS projects.

IBM Analytics. But the learning curve for IBM, that's what actually led us to pause on the implementation of the Cognos 10. Everything was pretty much difficult to do. Things that you could do in two clicks in Microsoft, you would be doing in five, ten clicks in IBM.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are affordability - because of the exchange in my country - and ease of use. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10, because you can actually go from the common tools that you use, from your Excel, from your SharePoint... You can pretty much do everything with it. The little things that you can't do, you can customize it to do by writing code.

I would say that, you should look away from the limitations. Focus on the positives of it, because it's cheaper to acquire than most of the big five. It's cheaper to acquire and easy to use.

I use it for budget analysis. I am in charge of budget analysis for the organization. I get figures from other units, and then I do a budget comparison with forecasting.

The performance is very good.

For a long time I had to do everything manually, and it took a long time. At the moment, I just have to refresh and I get my report. A few clicks are needed. Once I get the data in the right format, then I have the report as quickly as it is required.

It used to be stressful towards the month's end, to meet the deadline for reporting, especially when these reports are required by the board of the company. But now, as long as the other units give me my numbers on time, I don't waste a lot of time in preparing the numbers. I can now use my time in analyzing the outcome, rather than preparing the figures and cleaning up the data. It provides efficiency and saves time.

The most valuable features are the flexibility, how many ways you can interrogate the data, and the the graphical visualization.

They need to make it as user-friendly as possible. Make it as non-technical as possible. At the moment, if you are not a person who is familiar with modeling analysis, it might be a bit scary. So I think it should be a very simple user interface. It should be very easy to learn. 

It can be annoyingly slow at times, but I think it's because of the bandwidth, the connectivity we have. I've always believed if we had better connectivity, it would be perfect. Sometimes it's slow. But I really don't blame it on the solution. I blame it, but on my connectivity.

I always just try to Google if I have issues, and a lot of time that is perfectly good. I just need to know the basics.

I knew there must be a better way of doing what I was performing, so I searched. I did not have a previous solution, I just did things manually.

It was easy. The only thing I noticed was that it was so slow. It took a long time to download, but again, I think that was my connectivity.

At the moment I'm using a free version.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criterion for me is, it should be something that is really user-friendly. By that I mean, I don't need to go through specialized training to learn how to use it; not in this day and age, when the solution should be really a solution. I don't need to be an expert to know how to use it. Just user friendly, click and go. Also, I think it should be something that assures me of its stability.

For me, at the moment, it is the best thing that I've used. But I can't compare it to the other ones. It is the only one I know, apart from just normal financial modeling which I've used before. To me it is the best, but I can't really compared to any others because I don't know how the others work.

Do your research. For me, this is the only one I know. But I know there are others which are better.

Microsoft Power BI gives a true self-service tool to the user. The IT team can focus on ensuring that the database is in a good place. It is also in the cloud, which makes it easy for mobile access of reports and data. 

The business users have taken to Microsoft BI like a duck to water. It requires a low amount of training. Users already using Excel can generate new reports and dashboards within minutes.

• Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. 
• Not having to login again after a mobile app upgrade. A simple login on mobile would be great. 

None.

None.

They are fabulous.

The previous products include Tableau, Cognos, BusinessObjects, and Sisense. All of them have high price tags! Why pay and get ripped off for these products when you have Power BI? It will give you just as much, growing every month at an acceptable cost model.

Want to waste a lot of money? Then go for the others, I can recommend BusinessObjects as a great way to burn your money.

Initial setup was very straightforward. Users can get up and running reporting on databases within minutes. I can read a number of databases including a good old Excel spreadsheet. 

Internal Team. It is that easy. However, we did get a third party to do the training to key users for us. The course was tailored to our business. 

Paid for itself in the first month. 

Make it low in cost. It is a no-brainer! 

Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? 

Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost. 

Love that fact that we have a great development team that is moving the product forward every month. 

• P&L
• Revenue
• Logistics
• IT services
• Stock control
• Costs
• Sales

• Established a culture of management by indicators.
• Improvement of services
• Greater visibility of results

• Predictable cloud environment
• High performance
• Ease of development and maintenance

• Delta update
• More than 10 GB of space
• Single sign-on
• More than 30 Windows to update by Power Bi gateway.

Our primary use cases for this solution are Health and Wellness claims and short-term and long-term disability data.

It helped identify bad data, enabling the corrections needed to the data for management.

• Ease of use
• Dashboard
• Easy access to databases and spreadsheets
• Multi-table access

• More graphics and overlays
• More analytic tools
• More interfaces to databases, especially multi-table management