Microsoft Power BI Reviews

• 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

By building the multi-dimensional database with Analysis Services, we were able to improve the performance of our reporting system. Now, our end-users can see the data stories quickly through Excel, Power BI tools, etc.

It provides a full platform for our BI solution (database, ETL, reporting, analysis, and so on).

• Monitoring features: I need Microsoft to provide a set of tools to help me monitor Microsoft's products. For example, when I need to investigate the performance issues of SSIS packages, I do not have a tool, instead I have to write scripts to query data for analyzing performance.
• SSIS Connectors: Microsoft needs to provide more drivers to connect other data sources in a native way, which they are doing very well in Power BI, and that we can connect and process data from JSON, SOAP, SAP, Salesforce, and so on.

No.

No.

It is not excellent, but enough to resolve our issues.

It is quite easy to setup.

There are a lot of factors which we analyze and consider before we choose any product. In case we need a solution that we can develop, deploy quickly, and adapt to our business changes, Microsoft is the best candidate.

Microsoft offers us a full platform, which we use to develop and deploy our BI solution quickly and easily. It also provides both of these infrastructure for use: On-Premise and Azure Cloud. They are very flexible.

The self-service part.

We are a consultancy firm, helping our clients with billing and business intelligence solutions. We can see that it's really improved the way end users can do their own graphs and pick their own fields of information and present that in a nice way.

The navigation. The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit. It's user friendly, but you would like to have it even more user friendly.

When you do selections in one tab in Report, and then you move to the next tab, then you have to do your selections again. So one tab as a global, central selection possibility would help.

If you compare to QlikView, there's still a lot of functionality that QlikView has that Power BI doesn't. For most companies, Power BI is good enough, especially if you consider the price tag it's an easy choice. But it still has some catching up to do to match the functionality in QlikView.

Eight to 10 months.

It feels very stable. A bit slow sometimes when you change stuff and you want to refresh data and apply it to the data model in your queries. You want to apply that to your reports and dashboards and it can be a bit slow sometimes.

We don't have that experience yet. We still don't know how it is to deploy it in larger scales. So, that's my concern, but I haven't seen the scalability issues at our clients.

No, not yet. There are a lot of self-training videos and such out there on the internet and on the Microsoft websites.

QlikView and Qlik Sense. We felt demand in the market for Microsoft Power BI. Also, within my company we are selling services around Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Power BI hooks very well into the other Microsoft products.

It was pretty straightforward. Not much to set up. Cloud service and desktop client that you need to download and install, but if you have worked with other similar tools then you and know about that.

We are constantly looking for what is hot in the market and this has really come up as a rising star on the BI market, so it was not so much of a question about it at all. Quite obvious.

There are some limitations in regards to the navigation part.