Microsoft Power BI, A quick insight. What are your thoughts?

Advanced analytics in Power BI helps business users to monitor key performance indicators in real time. It helps the business to determine which metrics are driving more opportunities and success. Power BI provides beautiful and interactive dashboards which have complex data management systems.

About Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a web-based business analytics and data visualization platform that is suitable for businesses of all sizes. It monitors important organizational data and from all apps used by organizations. Microsoft Power BI provides tools to quickly analyse, transform and visualize data, and share reports.

Microsoft Power BI offers SQL Server Analysis Services through which users can quickly build reusable models using the overall data. The software enables users to integrate their apps, to deliver reports along with real-time dashboards.

Microsoft Power BI also provides self-service access to major third-party cloud sources such as GitHub, Zendesk, Marketo and Salesforce.

Microsoft Power BI is available both in free and paid (Pro) versions. The free version is not limited by any time; however, data of only 1GB per user can be analysed. Otherwise, it costs $10 per user per month for 10GB storage.

Pictures below are “sample only” indication of how your data can be presented using Microsoft Power BI. Of course, there is no limit to the creativity here.

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Thoughts captured from some of the professional industry experts and power BI users -

Pros

1.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.

2. The thing that most sets PowerBI apart from comparable business intelligence solutions is the lower cost of multi-user deployment within an organization. PowerBI is part of a Microsoft Office 365 subscription package for businesses and you only need to pay an additional 15USD/month for each additional admin/analyst account you add. This is a stark contrast to similar solutions like Tableau, which charge a monthly fee for each user and has a minimum user count that equates to roughly a 15,000USD/year license cost as minimum. If your organisation is already invested in the Microsoft Office ecosystem this could be the ideal solution for you if you need to keep costs down.

3. I love the way Power BI can show the data in a very eye friendly way. If you have a business that has markets, districts, and locations that need to show data then Power Bi allows you to break this down to any analytics you need to see with graph representation. Its great!

4. Great integration features varied options for visualization ability to centrally build reports and publish to user’s Regular auto upgrade of the features.

5. Easy to get started with Power BI if you are on the Microsoft 365 platform. Power Bi provides an easy to connect and interactive method for pulling data in real time from data collection system such as the SharePoint online, MS Excel and others. The ease of connecting with SharePoint is the strong point for my review. Having the Power Bi connected to the SharePoint system provides the opportunity to have real time dashboards and dynamic reports for any small organization that is wishing to provide real or near to real-time reporting without the heavy upfront implementation cost for software, training, and human resource. Microsoft has indeed liberated the Dynamic Reporting with Power BI and has also allowed for some very elegant web reporting to be created by non-technical users. My simple workflow, SharePoint for data collection, PowerBi for reporting.

6. Great free software to make plots and present data to executives, very customizable options, colours, and plot types. Data may be acquired from Excel file, data base or csv... Making it great to manipulate big amounts of data. Many filters can be applied on the same page to show data in different terms on the same plots. It can also make some data operations on itself prior to plotting. You can export plots to put in another document.

7. Integration with R for statistical analysis, business intelligence platform, integration with other Microsoft applications. Creating reports and sharing has become very easy.

8. It enables you to do a lot of on-the-fly analysis on your data, focusing in on specific aspects and further refining the results of your analysis.

9. The tool is very cheap given the visualisation resources and data integration it gives to developers and users. You can deploy and release great visuals of your data fast and easy, as well as to develop in-depth visuals integrating with Python or R.

Cons

1.It literally changes every three months. You just get used to it and with the next update a lot has changed. I do not 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.

Moderate cost for a moderate experience for medium sized enterprises

So so. The dashboards and reports are limited in visual design, so they all look the same and quite ugly. Because of the difficulty sharing reports/dashboards to external individuals and the lack of a Google sheets connector I could not use PowerBI for most of the solutions we need but will use it for some since it integrates well with the rest of the MS office ecosystem.

2.It cannot connect to google sheets and every other business intelligence platform can. This can be really limiting if your business uses a variety of SaaS solutions since many offer the simplest data integration options via Google sheets. PowerBI also has real issues with external sharing of dashboards/reports. You only have the option of publishing internally (visible to your organization's users) or publishing publicly (indexed in search engines). There is no option of sharing dashboards and reports to individuals outside your organization via a login, like what is done with Google Data Studio. PowerBI also has a steep learning curve and uses 3 coding languages (DAX, M, and SQL). It is more complicated than it needs to be, but it is relational database modelling has proven a good one and competitors have copied PowerBI's approach in recent years (Tableau).

3. It does take some knowledge around formulas and excel. If you do not have an analytic data team that can make these reports for you on Power BI, then it will take you a longer time to see the analytics from it.

4. large volume of data might clog running of the reports.

5. The main issues are around the changes that are made by Microsoft, this will always be a learning curve for the users. The lack of consistency on certain actions will be the biggest issue.

6. If you change the name of a column in the data source you need to change all plots to fit, it will not update automatically.

7. Microsoft applications have support issue and hangs up sometimes.

8. The learning curve. A lot of the usage is not very intuitive, so users often did not understand how to make use of the reports.

9. In my experience - a small business - I struggled a bit in the purchase journey. The website is not clear regarding pricing policies, so I had to access a third-party channel to purchase a Power BI Pro license.

Just like everything else there has to be a weighted average on the advantages and the drawbacks of using power BI. Gathering from these findings I suppose a lot depends upon the size of the business, the expertise of the user and the management's reporting requirements.