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.

I really like the profusion of learning media for PBI (webinar, forum, microsoft learning experience and LinkedIn Learning). You can learn at your pace. Quickstarting is easy. Becoming proficient require a bit more patience but is relatively easy for people using other microsoft tools (Excel).

I like that the product is deployed in many company. The competencies are transferable.

I like the well defined working environnement (Query -> BI -> Viz) and the provided editor that are really enabling for people like me that are not developper by trade.

Automation of import, analysis and viz is also a real game changer for people that were dependant on Excel before.

I dislike the lack of userfriendly info for more complex developpement.
I feel not guided enough regarding more technical information regarding the product.

Microsoft Power BI is an easy-to-use analytical tool that provides a convenient self-service data reporting and visualization solution for the average and non-technical business users. The desktop app and online service support data extraction, transformation, and visualization from various file types and offer built-in Power Platform integrations. The web service's rich AppSource marketplace provides apps and templates that help users design better dashboards more efficiently. Power BI's well-organized navigation menus make it seamless to integrate with other Microsoft solutions like Azure SQL database, virtual machines, and various Fabric Platform services for data science and data warehousing workflows. The Power BI community forums and user tutorials are helpful for new and experienced users alike.

Managing user permissions can become a bit complex when dealing with a large number of users and varying report access levels within the same workgroup and department. Also, the increasing number of options available in the user interface can sometimes feel overwhelming.

We used to use Excel but switched over to Power BI for the more advanced features. And they've been very very handy for us. The data cleaning works a lot better, there's tons more cutomization options, and some integrations have been made much easier compared to just Excel.

The imterface isn't the best to be honest, especially compared to stuff like Tableu. But gets the job done nonetheless.

Power BI enables users to work together and share dashboards and data with other people. Reports and dashboards can be shared by email, social media, and web publishing, among other methods available to users.
To ensure that sensitive data is protected, Power BI contains robust security features. In addition to controlling access to data, reports, and dashboards, users can create rules for preventing data loss.

Data that Power BI can ingest is limited in size. The free version must be extended to the paid version if I want to import data bigger than 2GB. It can also crash while processing huge datasets with complicated measurements, which makes using Power BI stressful at times.

For a tool to be this powerful and complete at this price level really does make it almost impossible to beat. If you have any experience with the Microsoft Power Query platform such as in Excel then Power BI is a natural next step for upping your BI and reporting game. The integration with the Microsoft Office system is seamless and it makes querying external data sources a doddle.

It can feel a bit clunky and slow if you do not have a high powered client - but the deployed dashboards take this issue away from everything except development. The only other issue I have encountered is in deploying this to a non-Microsoft environment but the tools are available to make it work, it just adds an overhead that you need to be aware of when evaluating the tool. Even with this overhead we have found Power BI to still be preferable to other options native to our non-Microsoft infrastructure and that is really impressive!

1. Free desktop tool for development(Power BI Desktop) and simple installation process.
2. Almost, we can connect many source to fetch the data. Ex csv,web,excel,sql,odbc etc..,
3. Specialized ETL(Extract,transform,load) to clean the raw unstructured data into structured data with help of Power Query.
4. Powerful DAX query to customized measure and calculated column to get desirable business metrics and KPIs.
5. Top standard visuals, Custom visuals(visual market) and also we can create our own visuals using reactjs.
6. Publish in cloud(azure) to view report anywhere in the world with help Power BI service.
7. High availability and low latency to view report and dashboard with help of xVelocity engine.
8. Anyone can easily create basic charts with structured data.

1. Power BI Desktop consumes a huge amount of resource in system.
2. Service monitoring increases for larger report consumers.
3. While dealing with an enormous volume of data, constant optimization takes place.

Easy to operate and understand. The application is highly advanced and provide high level advanced business analytics with huge utilities. The dashboard is interactive and is not boring at all. The business insights from data analysis is of great use and has wide business utilities. Server is good enough to manage any kind of data load due to which no lag or no slow down of system is observed. Correct and accurate analytics helps in driving accurate business decision making.

No problem. One of the best analytics and business intelligence tool in current era. Highly dynamic with wide features and numerous utilities. The tool is versatile and stable to function across any kind of business environment. It integrates well with any kind of other dashboards or other IT platform . Pulling and pushing of data is instant and accurate through Power Bi. No hassle or problem at all.

1. Improves with new releases every two weeks
2. Powerful insight management
3. Integration with MS products
4. Online forums and learning zones

1. Not as intuitive as packaged applications, but getting there
2. Not a good IDE for Python / R
3. Connectors to social media need to be improved

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.

Most of what I like about this is the outcomes of it, it is simply brilliant as to how we get such clarity on insights with this tool. This can make businesses take the correct decisions that drives them into good decision making that profits them. A one stop BI solution tool.

While creating complex relationships among data, it can be a little tedious to do it because if there are multiple links amongst the tables/data, POWER BI cannot handle them quite well at times. The factor of modeling the data in the right way comes in picture.

Microsoft Power BI is a wonderful cloud-based business intelligence tool that helps us to visualize data from multiple sources.
As per my view, it turns ugly numbers into amazing reports and visualizations and it doesn't require any prior high programming or technical knowledge.

We may experience some performance degrade when we work are working with big dataset. No. of data refresh is limited per day!

After using many other reporting tools, Power BI stands because it does a fantastic job of having powerful analytics from multiple data sources displayed using beautiful data visualization components.

Great for more simple reports and data visualization but not designed for heavy data processing (dependent on data source). Also huge learning curve to make things look the way you want them to look.

The ability to do data linking from different data sources and doing relations and end up developing organized and analyzed data for easy decision making.

It provides the ability to break down data to a level that is easy to understand.

The creation of dashboard in Power BI makes the reports appealing and data presented friendly to interact with.

Loading Microsoft power BI takes quite some time especially the desktop version. I don't the reason behind it but it could be better if it is looked into and a solution found will be of great help.

Free desktop tool for modeling is great to try out for anyone. Excellent customer support. Using the power bi web dashboard is a great way to gain the visibility that you need to make this Business intelligence valuable. Being able to send reports on a schedule makes it a great tool for displaying and sharing data. The level of features and third party visualization also makes this a versatility tool that any data driven groups could benefit from. Publishing from the desktop to the web version is extremely simple.

When creating measures and columns there can be some slowness or odd reactions while using the measures/columns as filters. Not able to choose a theme for the background colors.