Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Overall good software for beginners and can be explored to get the best efficiency from the softwarebelow are a few pros • Sharing dashboard in a group a. Sharing can be done once you have the Pro version of Power BI. Dashboard can be shared with the respective department members or your own team members. b. Since you have prepared the dashboard you will be the owner and you can decide whether you want to give the other members only viewing rights or editing rights as well. c. With this feature reports will always be on the cloud server and can be viewed as and when required d. Reports can be downloaded as and when required. • Viewing dashboard in Mobile/ tab and preparing phone layout a. Once a dashboard has been prepared and saved, the same can be accessed on Power BI App with the same login. b. Since the screen is small compared to laptop, all the dashboard elements can be redesigned to suit the phone screen. c. The other features remain the same and the dashboard is interactive on the phone as well however it cannot be edited on phone. • Export dashboard to PowerPoint, PDF a. This is one of the most important features of Power BI. Reports or dashboards prepared can be exported on PowerPoint or PDF with a click of a button. b. Hence Management reports and department reports can be automated on Power BI and once you refresh the data, the report will be ready to share. c. One problem is that few images which are not compatible with PowerPoint don’t show post downloading. • Narratives for dashboard a. This is one of the recent features offered by Power BI. With the help of narratives you can get the insight of the dashboard in a story form. b. Narrative uses its intelligence to study the data and give output in pointers, paragraphs etc which can be customised. • Importing visuals to suit your need a. Apart from the general visualizations available in Power BI, there are additional visualizations released by Power BI from time to time. These visualizations enhance the visual appearance as well as the adds to further analytics in different ways. b. Visualizations which have downloaded and used in the dashboard are Infographic designer, Narratives for Business Intelligence, KPI Column chart, and Timeline. • Edit interactions in dashboard a. It is important to understand the interactions and groupings in power BI since with the help of these you can control which graphs you want to automatically change by clicking on the other. b. With the help of grouping you can define groups and sub group which can be viewed together as a group if required. • KPI Column Chart a. This is a recent custom visual developed by Power BI. With the help of this visual you can put the KPI target against the actual on a monthly basis. b. Forecasted revenue/ cost can also be put in this visual which will be shown in different colour. c. Individual monthly targets can also be put which can be interchanged by putting variance. d. Data can also been viewed in a table form along with graphical.

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All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights.Power BI simplifies the process of combining different types of data sources to create a single data model. There are also many built-in Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) functions that help reduce the time required to prepare data. Creating reports and dashboards is as easy as drag and drop. The Power BI User Groups are strong and plentiful, so you can always read through blogs to get answers to questions that you may have. The Power BI Desktop application is used to perform ETL, create reports and is free. The reports are published to the Power BI cloud service for sharing, which is also free with limited capabilities. For more capabilities, such as security groups and scheduled data refreshing, there is a subscription fee. Microsoft will be releasing an on-premise solution for sharing Power BI content via an update to SQL Server 2016 hopefully within the next few months.

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I have been using PowerBI from the past 3 years and have never looked back. It has helped me as an analyst to draw my clients into my stories. The automation aspect of PowerBI is hard to ignore. I have shared my dashboards and collaborated with teams which was a nightmare before. I love the addition of new features resulting from a dedicate community of PowerBI users (with very responsive Microsoft developers jumping in to solve issues). Mobile version of PowerBI is convenient and a hit with clients.I love everything about PowerBI! I like to think of it as a revamped version of MS Excel but with features that exceed all expectations. PowerBI lets you create data models, use DAX to manipulate and summarise and finally display these summaries in fancy (yet easy to understand) visualisations. The best feature might however be the ability to share and collaborate on dashboards. PowerBI can take data from almost all possible sources - text, excel, SQL databases etc etc and integrate it all together to form dashboards that can be shared online in the form of webpages as well as workspaces.

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Data is the new petroleum, Information is the new combustible; and Power BI will boost this challenging new world of information and analysis.For the last 30 years I have been using Excel to work with Tables, Filters, Functions, Formulas, Conditional formatting, Graphs, Pivot tables, Segmentation and VBA to register data and analyze information. That was great. But now, with the huge amount of data, available from many sources and Excel limitations, we needed something more robust and Microsoft launched Power BI. I have been using it for more than a year. Now I don’t use pivot tables and graphs for analysis anymore, I use Power BI visualizations to represent and summarize the data. With it’s impressive tools including geolocalization, I have found more effective ways to convert, transform, represent, analyze and make better decisions and planning with Power BI. It’s ecosystem composed of Power Bi Desktop, Power BI Services (in the cloud) and Power Bi apps, has allowed me to find very innovative and productive ways to monitor the performance of my business and improve communication with my clients

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Power BI is awesome for companies which use Microsoft products on daily basis and for experienced excel users. if you got both things this is the low price answer to handle the data of the company. To start it is important to tell that Power BI, as is part of Microsoft business suite, is linked to other tools as Excel and SQL Server. Therefore the integration of the data of the company in one place is very easy. Power BI has a very good capabilities for report visualization, having more than 10 different kinds of charts you are able to represent the data of the company in a huge variety of formats making analysis pretty fast and easy. Let me tell you the database connectivity capabilities are outstanding with excellent cloud based connections as well.

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Analytics world is the future, and Power BI is the master of all that Glob...!As my experience as MIS Specialist in one of the most famous Fragrances Company in the Middle East, we see that in any company there's the accounting department that provide all reports and analytics that's demanded by other departments, according to that those guys have to do all there outcomes reports manually, and this process will cost time, efforts, stuffs,... for that one of great benefit from MS Power BI, is that he save me money, save me time, save me my the cost of wages for the accountants, my stuff in the accounting department is just about 5 great guys. All the mater is just I have to design the report and working on the Data Warehousing a little bit, then I can get my report in the target template that provide me all what I want, and furthermore, all reports up-to-date 7/24.

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I am using this tool since 2015. I struggled initially in writing the DAX Formulas to address different business problems. It is a great tool to use.It is a one-stop solution for visual analytics right from the Data Mash Up (Power Query) and Building Visualization. There is huge community (third party) who can build custom visualization to use in Power BI. It has greater flexibilty to address the complex business scenarios if you are well trained in DAX and M language. It can be integrated into many Microsoft Products like Share Point, O365 apps.

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I have been using this software for a few months, however the results I have obtained are extraordinary and it has helped me to present the information to other members of the company in which I work in a dynamic, attractive and easy to understand way, they can also use the Graphs to develop different types of reports, summaries and analyze the data to make better decisions for the organization, is excellent.What I like most about this software is the possibility of collaborating and sharing dashboards and dynamic reports. It is an excellent tool for conducting business analysis and making timely decisions for companies. Another of its best features is that it has a large number of data source connectors and its graphics are incredible, you can basically transform any amount of information into graphics that are easier to understand and visibly more attractive.

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Generally a good product that I am having my team self learn on and use in our management reports. Would like to see better connectivity to SQL within our secure corporate environment rather than having everything pushed to an Azure solution, which we are unlikely to get anytime soon. The pricing didn't seem to lend itself well to SME.Power BI is free to learn on which is ideal for novice users and organisations that have limited experience with BI packages. The developmental nature of the package is also interesting as new features are added in response e to the user community feedback through the forums. The learning from community forums , on line tutorials and Youtube videos has been invaluable.

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If you want to understand in what direction to move your business, to be always up to date, to receive data from anywhere in the world and from any device MS Power BI definitely your choice.You can access your data from anywhere in the world from any device and always keep abreast of your business. Great product from Microsoft. Easily connects to a large number of systems, can combine data from different sources. A large number of built-in reports and dashboards, informative charts that give a visual representation of your data. You can drill down into your data, publish your reports online, pleased with the opportunity to cost reports offline, followed by their publication. Deep integration with MS Office.

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In general what I like about Power BI is that it makes use of the tools that I already know as Excel and SQL Server, and it is integrated into the Microsoft enterprise suite.For any executive it is always important to have the information in the moment when it is needed. Power BI helps you to achieve this and easily connects to the data repository, the system already includes a variety of informative graphics that help to present the information of a very visual way In addition the system allows you to delve into the data to see the detail of the origin.

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As a starting point for our BI practice it worked just fine. Now, after 2 years we are beginning to have issues due to not available features. So far we are able to implement workarounds in the source databases before Power BI consumes data. We know eventually this has to change.I was able to create out daily operation KPI dashboards using Power BI in a very few days only using a very cheap Udemy course as training. For internal usage it can be a very affordable solution when compared to mostly every other enterprise BI solution in the market. Some of Office 365 services are already integrated to provide datasources to Power BI in a very simple way.

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PowerBI is great for what it is. While there are more out of the box robust options on the market, PowerBI has its place. It allows us quick access to copious amounts of data that the CRM complicates getting reports on and allows us to visualize the data more succinctly than a typical Excel readout. It is not without its faults, as some things remain easier and quicker within Excel, but it works wonders for quick read outs and visuals. The basic features are easy and accessible. You are able to perform quick reporting with a reliable dataset that is accessible from web and desktop platforms.

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In light of the hype around this "Tableau destroyer" in recent months, I want to highlight some fundamental flaws in data connectivity and reports maintenance of Power BI, which the Product Team so far has turned down as "not in scope". In practice, though, this renders Power BI pretty useless for getting dara from any 3rd party products, in the cloud in particular. This review reflects Power BI as of mid March 2017. I have gathered my knowledge from testing, community interaction and a dozen tickets with Power BI Pro Support. The focus lies on getting data via Web Services, much aligned with Microsoft’s «Cloud First» Strategy. 1) Power BI Online is in the cloud, but does not allow for HTTP calls. Power BI Desktop allows for HTTP calls, but only with static authentication parameters. First of all, a distinction needs to be made between Power BI Online and Power BI Desktop. While Power BI Online is the "master" that ultimately allows you to share and publish your reports, user experience in design is diminished by HTML limitations (you may know from Word or Excel Online) and more importantly, data connectivity (Get Data) is limited to SQL Servers on Azure and about 20 to 30 plugins from 3rd party solutions at present. Take note that on Power BI Online, you cannot select or manage your Gateways, either. This brings the attention to the Power BI Desktop client. Updated every one to two months, the Desktop client brings data connectors necessary to connect to a larger number of data sources. With the Web connector, HTTP calls been configured, although with just static headers and parameters and Basic and Windows authentication only. Importantly, though, Power BI Desktop includes Microsoft Power Query, which you may know from Excel 2016 already. With M Scripts, you can script and customise in many ways and most interestingly, convert it into table form quickly. This is where Power Query shines. However, Power Query does not seem to call on methods for nonces and timestamps required in token based authentication (OAuth for example). (Should this be incorrect, please please let me know. I have been browsing the fora and nagging Support too long already.) What’s really amusing here is that Microsoft Azure uses OAuth 2.0 themselves. So, you cannot run any reporting on Microsoft’s Azure AD or Resource Manager database for example, a notorious blackbox. Back to Powershell. (Power BI does not accept Powershell feeds.) In short, while Power BI Online does not allow to get any data out of the web (except for those 20 to 30 plugins, mostly Microsoft Products), Power BI Desktop allows for Web calls, but only with static parameters and thus, basically with your user credentials. That’s a big limitation in Data Connectivity. 2) With Power BI Online being the master, the HTTP calls cannot be scheduled or refreshed in the cloud. Now that you have configured your HTTP call (with risky user credentials), you want to publish your report and have it refreshed on a scheduled basis, say every day. Tough luck. While you can publish your Report to Power BI Online and subsequently a broader audience, it’s a static image of your Desktop data. You cannot schedule a data refresh in Power BI Online (because there is no Web feature anyway) and you cannot even refresh the data manually as this requires republishing the Report anew. You risk your management looking at outdated data whenever you forgot to republish your report and sneak the new URL into your dashboards and iframes. 3) The On-Premises Data Gateway is pretty useless for Web Services. Yes, there is the On-Premises Data Gateway. Yes, you can configure Web Services in the gateway, although it’s pretty ironic to route web calls via on-premises infrastructure. But did you ever try it? That is, you cannot specify any HTTP headers fort he calls at all, lest writing a Power Query script. And thus, we are back at authentication via Basic and Windows only and writing REST scripts in the data source for every single HTTP call because with no Headers and Body, all parameters need to be coded in the URI. Will you do that? At the end of the day, Power BI is Microsoft's long overdue acknowledgement that Excel and some Dynamics Reports do not cut it for Reporting purposes. Indeed, for reporting on SQL Server, Dynamics 365 (if you want to afford it), and Excel and Access databases stored in your OneDrive, Microsoft Power BI does a neat job. However, as soon as you want to integrate with 3rd party systems or via web services in particular, Power BI presents so many limitations in authentication, Header and Body configuration, scripting, and scheduling that you need to configure an entire SQL Server environment (on Azure or On-Premises via feature poor Gateway) and write a SQL CRL interface or buy Azure Data Factory to get that data in. For some pretty reports, do you really want to buy and customise all that BI infrastructure on Azure? My advice to Microsoft: Work on Data Connectivity, especially in Power BI Online, rather than more visuals for those limited data sources. Your Microsoft clients will consider Power BI a given for the utter lack of reporting in Office 365, Azure, or Dynamics 365 (yes, pushing it there). My advice to Users: If the connectors are not listed, look somewhere else. (And make sure it’s your use case that is listed. Power BI announced an Azure AD connector, but rather than reporting on Users, Groups, or Enterprise Apps, you can only see on a nice map where the last logins happened.) Is it a Tableau destroyer? No. It’s a long overdue acknowledgement for necessary reporting with the potential of being a solid Business Intelligence solution ONCE focus comes to lie more on data.pretty visuals Power Query On-premises Data Gateway responsible Pro Support

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I love that they have a free version for developers, and it is very cheap for non-profits. It has a lot of flexibility when it comes to connecting with several interfaces. It has a lot of the recipe features that Google Data Studio has. If you are already a user of several Office 365 products, you'll enjoy this a lot, because you don't need to create a lot of mappings. I like the interfaces that it has with Mail Chimp and Google analytics (and several others), as it comes with recommended reports which you could take live from the sources. It didn't take me a while to get used to using PowerBI. If you have some Business Intelligence knowledge, this will be a piece of cake for you.

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I was able to integrate it into a fairly outdated Microsoft office suite, so that was really useful for me. My organization uses a lot of legacy software for security purposes, so it was nice to have a Business intelligence tool that can be easily deployed "out of the box", as opposed to some newer tools. I was fairly easily able to generate reports, pair it with an ETL tool that I was using, and pretty much speed up a few reporting processes.It's features are extremely robust and has some of the best integration for data warehousing of any "off the shelf" tools. I think Power BI is great for medium scale companies and ventures because there's a ton of support from Microsoft and third party companies as well. Most large organizations, in my experience, should have enough staff with Power BI knowledge to call on as business experts.

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Power BI has transformed how our company looks at data and reporting. It just keeps getting better and better.While already a robust and competitive analytics software, Power BI is constantly coming out with new and improved features and functionality. The integrations with Excel is impressive and makes my life so much easier.

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- amazing tool for excel gurus, the interface is just like excel - very user friendly - great visuals and interactive reports - power bi.com service is useful feature for publishing reports - phone apps are helpful at times - great features like data modelling , group by, merge, combine for large data sets - open source desktop version

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Power BI is easy to use. The learning curve is low. However, it still provide rich features and functionalities . It is a great visual tool. Microsoft continues to provide monthly updates on adding new functions.

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Excel to the highest level. I get to create dashboards and solutions to embed within websites that users have access to that automates easily and can handle huge datasetsThe most powerful uses of Power BI are how easy it is to use. It connects to almost every data type imaginable and has countless intuitive visualizations built in. Their open-source visualization library is great for finding new visualizations on the fly. Excel users feel right at home with making graphs, tables within the tool and can create a solution that can be automated and deployed.

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Allows for a great work environment and to maximize overall productivity. It seems very versatile. I have been using it daily for the past year since it was implemented here at my work. It allows for ease of day to day managing of files and allows for me to maximize my productivity. We have it customized to individual department use so this allows for my team to up their productivity. Easy system to learn and overall very user friendly. It can also be integrated to be used with other systems.

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The amount of different types of data that can be integrated and analyzed makes this an extremely powerful tool. Businesses from small to large can integrate essentially any data stored digitally for cross reference, analysis, and visualization. Our organization has realized new avenues of business analytics with the options available in Power BI. Dashboards have allowed a more free flow of processed information and has reduced the need for some in-person exchange of the same information (meetings, status calls, etc.). C-suite engagement with Power BI dashboards have provided new strategic opportunities by allowing executives to focus more and spend less time

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Ability to pull in data from tons of sources including on premises SQL. It’s easy for new users to drag and drop stuff and the language isn’t super complex. The service also now hosts RDL files for a one stop shop for reporting. Flexible security options.

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I am now on my third BI Project in which I created the User interface with Power BI Reports and Dashboards. So far the clients were extremely happy with the way Power BI looks as well as how easy it is to learn. The most popular feature is the report interactivity - clicking in a chart is filtering the rest of the report accordingly which is really fun to make use of.- Easy to use - Easy to learn - very intuitive - Allows powerful calculations - constantly new features and developments - great community, you can find an answer to almost any question - very interactive, it tempts to play around with the reports

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The ease of use of the software is particularly appealing as it is built on the usual Microsoft office interface. I particularly also like the fact the software is available in Desktop and online versions and there is synchronicity between the desktop and cloud versions. Conclusively, diversity of data sources allows for versatility.

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