Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics application that makes it easy for anyone to create their own reporting interfaces and dashboards. The product itself is an integrated component of the Microsoft Power Platform.
The product was essentially developed in the 2000s by two developers from the Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services team. The software was first published in 2011 as Project Crescent, which was later renamed Power BI and became Power BI for Office 365 in September 2013. The first release was based on Microsoft Excel extensions (such as Power Query, Power Pivot or Power View). The development continued and more features were added and finally released to the public in 2015. In February 2019, the analytics firm Gartner confirmed the capabilities of the Microsoft Power BI Platform and ranked it as the leader in the “2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform.”
The software is built on two main components:
- Microsoft Power BI Desktop: a Windows desktop application, which is effectively the development environment for the application. Reports generated here can be published to Microsoft Power BI Services.
- Microsoft Power BI Services: essentially a cloud-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) application. Power BI is a federation of software services and applications. On this platform, different dashboards can be set up with different data tiles, so that companies can monitor their data up to date.
- In addition, there are a number of other components that also add useful functionality to the two main core “products”. One of these is Power BI Mobile, which helps to display reports on Android and iOS devices.
As with any product, and its use, there are pros and cons – this is no different for software. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages
Benefits:
- You can make BI accessible to everyone – and cost-effectively, as the Power BI Desktop app is free for anyone to download.
- Regular updates (weekly and monthly) – keep the application up-to-date by considering the opinions and suggestions of thousands of users in the development process.
- Unification of self-service and enterprise BI – unifies both areas in a single platform.
- Microsoft Azure connectivity – connect and analyse your entire enterprise data asset.
- Microsoft AI support – create machine learning models quickly and easily to extract insights from data faster and faster.
- In-depth version management – track and identify differences between versions easily, or even between test and development files.
- Microsoft Excel connectivity – transfer Excel queries, data models and even convert from Power BI to Excel format easily.
- Decision support features – Microsoft Power Platform (including Power Apps and Power Automate) makes it easy to make instant decisions based on Power BI results.
- Real-time analytics – not only time series but also real-time analytics results can be tracked.
- Interactive visualizations – one of the most referred benefits is the attractive, intuitive, and interactive visualizations. Using filters, you can interact with the visualisations. They allow you to understand the data extremely well and quickly.
Disadvantages:
- Advanced users will benefit most from the software.
- Extremely wide product range – there are many components in the platform, and it takes a long time to learn and deepen your knowledge of each part. In addition, there may be some problems with operation tasks.
- Data quality – in terms of data cleansing, the application has relatively few features because it assumes that the data loaded is already of decent quality. The built-in PowerQuery component opens a world of its own for the user.
- Performance problems – the user can often run into performance problems on load, arising in the context of larger queries.
- User Interface issues – vital details are often hidden by the formula’s help window and side parameters.
- Limited Data Sharing – Reports and dashboards can only be shared with people in the same email domain or whose email domain is listed as a tenant in our O365 account.
To sum up, Power BI has some general drawbacks, but we are confident that it is a great tool for visualizing, analysing, and publishing data. Thanks to continuous improvements, the suite is regularly updated with new features and performance is improving.
Source: Microsoft, Gartner