Microsoft Power BI: Pros and Cons

Papers scattered with statistical graphs by Yan Krukov

Data science and data visualization are popular subjects in American corporations. Every business aspires to transform data into a useful information tableau. Many businesses and people are utilizing the free or inexpensive Microsoft Power BI application.

Are you thinking about adopting Microsoft Power BI? We will go over the benefits and drawbacks of this business intelligence tool in this blog to help you determine if it is the ideal data analytics solution for your company.

What is Microsoft BI?

There was a time when businesses relied heavily on intuition or information gained through time and experiences to make important decisions. The way that firms strategize, run, and perform has been altered by enterprise business intelligence.

The business intelligence market was expected to reach a value of USD 33.3 billion by 2025, up from USD 23.1 billion in 2020, according to Markets and Markets, with a CAGR of 7.6 percent over the defined timeline.

The market has been anticipated to rise because of several factors, including the increasing emphasis on digital transformation, rising analytics investments, rising demand for dashboards for data visualization, rising cloud usage, and rising data creation.

Although there are numerous BI tools available, Microsoft Power BI is a front runner in the BI market that provides insights to support quick and educated choices.

• Using straightforward plug-in functionality, the cloud-based Microsoft Business Intelligence service Power BI enables you to generate reports and dashboards. Power BI is a user-friendly application that offers a variety of features that may be customized for the end-user.

• Data exploration on-premises and in the cloud, collaborative dashboards, built-in data governance, and security are just a few useful features that Power BI offers.

• Despite having a strong feature set and being one of the most widely used tools in the market, it is crucial to determine whether Microsoft Power BI is the best option for your company’s needs.

To help you clarify what makes Microsoft Power BI the tool, we will weigh its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of Microsoft BI

Microsoft’s response to other well-known visualization software packages like Tableau and MicroStrategy is Power BI.

Hence, it is a relatively new addition to the analytics solution suite, but comes with a distinctive feature set and advantages, and has established itself as one of the top business analytics tools.

An easy tool to get the hang of

• Even for first-time users, Microsoft Power BI is made to be useful and easy to learn. It can be employed easily without a prior understanding of BI tools.

• Making graphs, tables, and charts from a Power BI dataset may be easy if the user has a basic understanding of Excel.

• Slicers, which are filters, may also be used to converge your reports on certain data that satisfies the necessary requirements.

Relatively affordable

The free edition of Power BI is quite attractive.

• Certain capabilities are only accessible with a paid license; however, the free version can be sufficient for a small business with a relatively low report usage rate.

• Even in a big enterprise, a user may test out Power BI for free before making a purchase. The paid (PRO) version’s most appealing feature is report sharing.

  • A developer may construct a dashboard using Power BI Pro and upload it to the Microsoft Power BI web portal so that other Pro users can access it online just like any other web page.

Interactive content

Power BI’s self-service functionality and interactive content are its core selling points.

• Business intelligence (BI) analysts often produce several reports that are updated regularly. These reports are shared through email or by uploading them to a shared place and saving them in PDF or Excel format.

• The BI teams who create the reports routinely receive requests from users to modify them since the reports are static.

• Analyst resources are overworked as a result, and decision-makers struggle to have timely access to data. Self-serve reporting systems like Power BI have become more and more popular since they solve this problem.

  • An analyst may use Power BI Microsoft to create a report and include choices that allow users to dig down and view the outcomes for specific subsets of the data that they are interested in.

  • The data collection and presentation methods are within the analyst’s control, but the users are given considerable liberty to make supported changes.

Self-service access not only saves time but also promotes exploration, which frequently leads to important discoveries.

Frequent updates and innovations

• Every month, Microsoft upgrades Power BI. Additionally, and more crucially, Microsoft pays attention to the requirements of the user base.

  • Making recommendations for improvements is simple. The users can also rank the recommendations, which increases the likelihood of popular proposals being included in the upcoming edition.

• Updates are also easy. If an update is released, Power BI will let you know when you launch it.

Can connect to multiple data sources

Microsoft Power BI can connect to a variety of data types and sources, whether it’s reading information from text files like XML and JSON or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. It can also compile data from BI tools like Google Analytics, Facebook, and Salesforce.

• Power BI gathers information from several sources and keeps it as datasets in one place for offline analysis.

• Additionally, MS Power BI offers interaction with Microsoft Excel, enabling users to perform a more in-depth analysis of data on a spreadsheet.

Effective comprehension of data

There are a ton of tools and widgets in Power BI that bring the data to life. Data visualization helps in transforming data science into well-informed decisions.

• Data can also be turned into information by being shown in gauges or on geographic maps. Map visualizations help display numerical data on a map, illustrating geographical linkages and trends, etc.

• Power Bi tool incorporates both KPI visualization and R script visualization. It demonstrates the degree of progress made towards a quantifiable objective.

• Multiple visuals may be included in one report. Reports enrich the experience with title boxes and cards.

Power BI is a great tool for producing data visualizations.

Disadvantages of Microsoft BI

Now let’s look at a few shortcomings of this BI tool to help you better understand what is missing from it and whether it is a good fit for your company’s needs.

A bulky user interface

• Some users of Powerbi complain that the software’s user interface is quite muddled. This perspective can be the result of the interface’s excessive icon count, which hides the dashboard and the report itself.

• Microsoft has worked to improve the UX experience for Power BI customers since this has been a dominant complaint given in the feedback, and it continues to do so with each new version.

Limited Capacity for data handling

The total quantity of data that Power BI can absorb is limited. When the data reaches the limit, you must upgrade to Power BI’s paid edition.

• The dashboard in the free edition might take a while to load when users are dealing with significant amounts of data.

• It takes a long time to ingest millions of rows of data. Although this may not always be a Power BI server issue, it might be annoying if you are creating datasets with a lot of data.

• Microsoft BI must be installed on a user’s computer to view the dashboard in the free edition, and further configuration may be needed to connect to databases.

Restricted alteration of visuals

• Even though Power BI’s visualizations are visually appealing, there are just a few ways you may customize them to meet your needs.

• No custom-coded graphic solutions can completely do away with this issue.

Rigid Formula

• In Microsoft Power BI, DAX is the expression language that is utilized to work with data. The DAX formula in Power BI may be used for a variety of tasks, but it is still not the most user-friendly language.

• Your own Power BI formulae may or may not always perform effectively. You can concatenate up to two components, however, nesting statements are required for concatenating more than two elements.

This brings an end to our reflection on Power BI’s benefits and drawbacks. Even after going over some of Power BI’s drawbacks, we are confident that Power BI is a fantastic tool for data analysis and visualization. Furthermore, Microsoft Power BI is continually attempting to enhance itself, so we may anticipate even better versions in the future.

Conclusion

Businesses are placing a lot of faith in enterprise intelligence platforms like Microsoft Power Bi to assemble useful actionable insights and respond to the constantly changing needs of consumers.

The BI tools available in the market can increase productivity, decrease the need for manual consolidation, and collect insightful data.

Connect with our specialists before hiring a power BI developer to learn more about how the combination of data analysis, visualization capability, and reporting dynamics may be a beneficial addition to your company.

Our experts can help you fully leverage any business intelligence solutions that you prefer.

You can even our portfolio to explore our software development services, data analytics services, and data insights solutions.

Are you ready to embrace a business intelligence solution? Contact us now!