Like or Dislike: Microsoft Power BI

Power BI came into my radar five years ago. By the time I was very reluctant to look into it. However, Microsoft Power BI became popular in town since 2017 and it jumped to the front leader in business intelligence (BI) sector in Gartner reports in the past two to three years. There are many BI tools out there such as Tableau, Qlik, Spotfire, SAS and so on. So, what makes Power BI stand out? Are there anything that might annoy users?

Although I have been supporting Power BI analytics users from technical perspective in the last few years, I did not spend lots of time on building Power BI dashboards. Recently I spent some time and went over the Power BI training materials in Microsoft Learn. Power BI actually impressed me with some cool features. It encouraged me to share some thoughts and observations about Power BI.

The Like:

Cost effective

For any companies, cost is always a key factor when selecting tools. Browsing on the BI market, who is the most cost effective BI tool in which the features meet customer needs? Generally speaking, Power BI is the winner!

Firstly, the report authoring tool Power BI Desktop is free. It can be used individually or commercially. Secondly, Power BI Pro license is just $10 per month per user that allows developers to share reports in Power BI cloud services. In addition, Power BI cloud service P1 node enterprise solution only costs about $4,995 per month. Furthermore, if a company has a SQL server cluster, an on-premise Power BI report server is free.

If cost is a big deal, Power BI is the way to go.

Built-in Data Prep Functionalities

The significant advantage of Power BI over other peer products is the built-in Power Query editor. As most business intelligence users know, data cleaning and manipulation probably consumes 80% of time and efforts to build a report. Power BI Query editor is a big helper to transform and massage data with tons of common features. There is no need to buy another data transformation tool with additional cost.

Rich Visualization Features

Apparently most common tables, matrix, charts are available in Power BI. For example, line chart, bar chart, pie chart, scatter plot, combination chart, map chart. Power BI also has an app store with hundreds additional visual charts to choose from for free.

Flexible Formatting

Regarding formatting, it is hard to find another BI product that can beat Power BI. Almost any components can be formatted in a Power BI dashboard like font, color, boarder, title, size. Power BI also has conditional formatting capabilities that enriches KPI metrics.

Short learning curve

For many Microsoft Excel users, they may feel so easy to transition from Excel to Power BI. Similar look and feel, similar formula DAX language, drag and drop, even the color themes are closer. The learning curve for new users are quite short. It is so easy to migrate skills from Excel to Power BI.

Free Learning Materials

Many free Microsoft learning tutorials are available in powerbi.com and Microsoft learn. There is no need to spend a couple of thousand dollars to learn Power BI in a consulting firm for self-starters.

Adequate technical support

To further reduce cost, Microsoft provides free technical support for Power BI users either via telephone or email. For non-urgent needs, it is good enough to keep business process running at certain service level.

The Dislike:

Performance

Power BI has hundreds of data source connectors. Most common data sources are available. For any data sizes less than 10 million records, it is unnoticeable any performance issues since Power BI uses in-memory columnar store technology. However, if the data size is big, say 50 million records, the pain will appear when data is being loaded and old computers will crash due to hardware resource constraints. Fortunately, there are workarounds if a faster data engine available such as Snowflake, processing workloads can be moved to the fast data engine to avoid Power BI performance degradation issues.

On-premise solution

Power BI report server is provided as a free on-premise solution. Some features in Power BI cloud services are not available in Power BI report server such as email subscription. Also some feature releases for Power BI report server are later than they are for Power BI cloud services. Be sure those features are not a showstopper when adopting tools.

Conclusion

Overall, the cost effectiveness, feature richness and easy to use of Power BI will outperform in the BI market. Whether like Power BI or not, to project, Power BI will continue to bite the cake of BI market share in the next few years.