Microsoft Power BI Reviews

As the title says, it turns ugly numbers into pretty pictures. It is easy enough for a non-developer to use and turn a mess of data into an intelligent and understandable story.

It literally changes every three months. You just get used to it and with the next update a lot has changed. I don't really see this as a con though because this is more like a Christmas present waiting to see what they will have made better this go around.

It is fairly easy to use and allows for a great variety in visualizations. Fairly cheap compared to other competitors and the free option is a bonus. The community providing new visualizations is a great bonus as well.

Other platforms like Tableau are much easier to use in terms of self-service BI and seem to do better performance wise

We combine artificial intelligence and process mining with Power BI to optimize our processes

We didn't find any negative points

powerbi is easy to use and drag and drop data, import and export is easy and little training required for team members

improved connections to different data sets and import of different database types will be more helpful

Microsoft Power BI is a very powerful business intelligence tool that offers the best services for analyzing business data. It has built-in AI capabilities which helps have deep analysis on your data so as to generate insights that will give a clear view of your business. It has very useful reporting features with excellent data visualization options to makes it easy to understand the analyzed data. Its security features like end-to-end encryption are very powerful and help keep all the data secure.

Microsoft Power BI is very effective tool with very easy to use features. I have had a very easy time using it and there is nothing i like least about it.

Power BI allows users to create their own customized visuals. I am allowed to create and customize visual options which meet specific industry and organizational needs. This ability that Power BI provides, to implement and design proprietary and custom data visualizations , unique to my organization , is what I like the most.

I describe Microsoft Power BI as very rigid, in terms of integrating it with non-Microsoft applications and third party data sources. Although, there are effective workarounds to this shortfall, they come with a lot of frustration.

Microsoft Power BI offers a variety of data visualization options to help users quickly identify trends, patterns, and insights within their data. It provides a powerful cloud-enabled platform to store and share data securely. It can easily integrate with other Microsoft products, such as Excel and SharePoint. It is highly customizable, allowing users to customize their dashboards for better analysis and presentation.

Advanced features may require some training and experience to use. More expensive than some other comparable analytics software

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful data visualization and business intelligence tool that allows users to create interactive dashboards and reports from a wide range of data sources. It offers an easy-to-use interface and a wide range of customization options, making it a great choice for both experienced data analysts and those new to business intelligence.

One of the standout features of Power BI is its ability to connect to a wide range of data sources, including Excel files, SQL databases, and even social media platforms. This makes it easy to gather and analyze data from multiple sources in one place.

PowerBI is powerful, complex to learn, but really powerful once you understand

The learning curve is big on this software, but luckily it is well used and there are tons of youTube videos that explain how to do it.

PowerBI Helped My Team Report More Effectively. We were able to quickly report out on the status of projects and save time with out having to update slide decks we previously leveraged for reporting.

Some API’s with 3rd party tools weren’t easy to connect and data was sometimes lost in an upload.

The dashboard creation is amazing. Give it a data source, design how you want to see your data, and it shows it to you. I enjoy creating dashboards for our different departments. And once our staff sees the reports and dashboards they get from this, vs how they used to get it in an Excel spreadsheet or an Access Report, they are hooked.

Overwhelming in the back end. Sometimes you just cannot get the data to display the way you want. There are so many options, features, methods. It gets overwhelming. My biggest gripe is that the back end is not as user friendly as other programs. And, comparing it to something that one of my users would create in Excel, it's difficult for me to get the exact data reported that they want. I have to figure out how to display it, and because the Power Bi is just so robust, it's a little overwhelming in that respect.

The interface is beautiful and easy to navigate. Once data sources are all connected, it's pretty easy to create a new dashboard/layout if you know how to analyze your own data. Nearly every integration that we needed was already included.

It's hard to build some more complex reports. If you want to combine two different data sources into one view/metric, you will need some advanced skills.

1. The wide and deep design and full support for upstream and downstream systems;

2. Excellent query engine with well design data modelling principals (which is better than Tableau);

3. Seamless integration with other Microsoft data integration products such as SSIS, SSRS, SSAS;

4. Excellent knowledgebase community and support;

5. Quick update to the Azure cloud support

1. UI design is a little bit inconvenient comparing to Tableau.
2. DAX is a bit complicated for power users.

I have used Tableau and Google Data Studio - among other alternatives. Nothing has seemed to compare to the functionality that Power BI offers. Everything about the program is made with the full spectrum of analysis in mind - from the designer to the data 'wrangler' to the end consumer (ie. others within the enterprise). In this way, Power BI is extremely powerful because it can be used for so many different types of projects; the data-analysis intensive to the more visual 'data-presentation' dashboards.

Sharing dashboards and reports in Power BI is easy and it has a lot of options for doing so. However, the requirement that all users must have a Pro Account to view dashboards created in Pro is a bit of a hindrance in a global organization where it does not make economical sense for every employee to have a Pro account. It seems like it would be a great addition to allow limited sharing to everyone - even those without a Pro account, as most of my internal team does not have an account.

Capability to Extract, Transform data at the desktop level in a single package. (Others solutions like have Data transformation feature inbuilt)

On publishing your report online, it gets slightly cumbersome to configure through (like configuring gateways for auto-refresh)

What I’ve enjoy about using Power BI is that have simplified the process of creating and sharing reports. It’s a very helpful tool to visualize data, and you can connected with several data sources like Excel, SQL and Access. You can share a report via link and you can choose the option that works best for you, like if, everyone that have the link can access to the report or some specific people. The people that have access can view and interact with the report but not modify it. An interesting and helpful feature is mobile layout view. You can create views of reports adapted to mobiles. I learned to create dashboards in Power BI by myself, there’s no need of a full training before start using this tool.

Something that had me struggling is that the data source must be as simple and clean as it could be or it may present execution issues. It often shows running issues for certain inquiries.

It's free version is very powerful. We can create any report we need, has a lot of data sources and even can create subscription for sending the reports automatically.

So far, the only issue I have found is when there are relation on different conditons for the same visual. It can separate and is hard to achive the result.

I like Power BI because it offers a professional look to presentations. I am able to create and manage dashboards for my various projects. I can upload data from other tools like Excel and use the data to add to or update my dashboards.

The tool can be a little confusing making it difficult to learn and use.

1. Ease of Use: Unlike other BI software’s, Power BI's interface is friendlier especially to MS Excel users. You will not feel overwhelmed rather it will look familiar.
2. Powerful engine: Users who need to tackle very large datasets with thousands of entries know that MS excel gets horribly slow processing such a large file. Power BI is a God sent for these users. Its processing engine is super-fast and the speed is more noticeable when you let it handle such large datasets.
3. Excellent data presentation tools: For regular MS Excel users Power BI is a PowerPivot on steroid but a lot smarter one. Even those users who are not familiar with the complexities of PowerPivot feels less intimidated by its simple and user friendly design.
4. User friendly but powerful DAX language: To write formulas you have to use DAX language in Power BI which in my opinion is a fancy name of just natural language formula writing. However, DAX is super easy to learn and pretty much intuitive but at the same time very much powerful.
5. Schedule refresh option: Power BI has an option to auto update the report at fixed interval of time which is very helpful if you need to prepare and submit reports weekly or monthly.
6. Option to control users of the report: In Power BI you can share your reports with other users and also control how much of the report can they see. If you want you can allow only a part of the report to be seen by some user which is super convenient.

Honestly, in my opinion, Power BI is by far the best software made by Microsoft. But considering I am a heavy user of MS Excel, it is easier to me. I think learning curve of Power BI for a beginner with no prior skill in MS Excel will be a bit steep. Then again, BI is a complex thing itself. So master any kind of BI software will be tricky by its own merit.

Having been a user of the full range of Microsoft Office, it was only natural that PowerBI comes to mind when trying to create a live update dashboard. It is extremely easy to use - a plug and play approach comes to mind - and if you had worked with Microsoft Office before, some of the features are very intuitive to use. If the organisation that you are working with uses Microsoft Office, access issues are sorted and it becomes incredibly easy to drive adoption of this dashboard on a day to day basis

The design of the dashboard created with PowerBI can be found to be lacking at points, compared to some of the other BI softwares. The templates available seem great, but there aren't as many options as I would like when I am creating a specific type of dashboard.

Power BI is great especially with data analytics and visualization. This is usually very informative especially to the senior management when creating dashboard and data summaries. For example, Its specifically important in monitoring budget and expenditure data. The most important advantage of Power Bi is how it can easily summarize, transform and visualize data through summaries and dash board reports. In addition Power BI delivers real-time reports especially when linked with production of the data. It both accessible on computer and mobile. It is also very easy to integrate with excel and other data storing softwares.

It is somehow technical especially when writing DAX scripts and when linking several tables for relationships. Since its mainly used for Dashboards and visualizations, the presentations can be crowded considering a lot of information is supposed to be squeezed on one page. Power BI also requires complex formulas in DAX which sometimes can give wrong results from expected. It also takes a lot of time to prepare data and create visuals.

Microsoft Power BI is one of the most comprehensive data visualization platforms you've ever used. Power BI allows me to collect data from various sources, such as azure and SharePoint databases, it is a platform with enormous potential since it can transform data and give a better perspective, what I like about Power Bi is that it has an easy-to-use user interface without long learning curves, which makes it easy to use for new users, you can see the tables in an orderly way this facilitates data analysis, in Power BI it is safe to use, since it allows only authorized users can access, this is vital since the information that is stored is very sensitive.

What I don't like is that the desktop version consumes a lot of RAM and is sometimes slow, a computer with good specifications is required for it to run smoothly.

Since we began making data visible to our product builders using this software, performance has improved, with savings up to $100k per month

It was dificult to deploy the use to other production units since the dashboards and datasets needed to be customized

Similarity with excel and power query. Since most of us know excel and worked on DAX, I found Power BI very user friendly. Also the visualisation of this software is very attractive and modern looking.
As a BI tool, this can process Big data from multiple sources and automate things which helps us to reduce unnecessary time building reports and dashboards.
Also this has the functionality to share/embed which helps to make report sharing easy without hassle.

Data visualisation panel should be more easy to use.

Power BI is extremely visual, as a result is really easy to use it without being programmer.

It is not heavily focused on the computations that senior data scientists needs.