Power BI Benefits and Insights

Why use Power BI?

Key differentiators & advantages of Power BI

Quickly Connect to and Prep Data: Data connectors rapidly draw data directly from its source without editing the original information. Power Query helps users match their data preparation process to their analysis requirements and prepare it for visualization or modeling in record time.
Share Insights: Interactive reports make it easy for collaborators, clients and team members to explore reports and dive into the graphic to gain a better understanding of the data.
Create a Data Literate Culture: Instead of spending valuable company time in meetings to explain metrics and reports, users can perform all their collaboration within the BI system. Loop in every relevant teammate and publish real-time visualizations to keep everyone up-to-date on vital information.
Monitor and Administrate Business: Administrators can remotely check in on locations to explore compliance, data governance, usage and more from any endpoint in their organization. It offers a comprehensive overview of data consumption throughout the business and helps managers make more informed decisions.
Strategize and Implement Business Plans: Mobile access gives managers insight into their business from anywhere and configurable reports keep relevant parties updated when triggers or thresholds are met. Widely sharable visualizations keep all members informed and make data-informed decisions based on past business performance.
Enterprise-Grade Analytics at Self-Service Availability: This robust solution can handle large datasets from Hadoop, Hive and other big databases. It offers enterprise-level analysis, powerful semantics modeling, ALM toolkits and other necessary tools to all users, not just data analysts.

Industry Expertise

Microsoft serves a wide variety of the world’s industries and organizations, but some of its specialties include telecommunications, government, automotive, financial services, manufacturing, health, media and entertainment, education, retail, etc.

Key Features

Admin Portal: Gives managers access to an overview of BI infrastructure. They can monitor data consumption, customize user settings, assign capacity admins and track various metrics to monitor the system’s usage.
Power Query: Also known as Get & Transform in Excel 2016, this feature offers data ingestion, integration, transformation, cleaning and enrichment from a variety of sources. Users can create custom filters or views, render Excel charts, add new data sources and search data within an organization.
Data Manipulation: Excel integration lets data analysts model and customize data filters. They can prepare data with unpivot, filter, column by example and a range of other data manipulation tools that let them explore data as well as manage data relationships.
Excel Integration: Users can draw formulas and tables directly from Excel and convert them into Power BI dashboards.
Custom Narrative Visuals: Analysts can customize the colors and themes of reports in addition to how reports will be viewed by device.
Power Platform: Combine Power BI with Power Automate and Power Apps to build custom business applications that fit your organization’s unique needs.

Limitations

Some of the product limitations include:

No direct integration available for services like Vend POS or Shopify
Graphical visualization is fairly limited as compared to other BI tools
Doesn’t support SQL queries
Comparatively difficult to work with huge data sets on Power BI
Doesn’t let users build scheduled reports, personalized user views, personalized notifications, personalized security views or customizable reports

Microsoft Power BI Suite Support

Only Power BI Pro subscribers have access to paid support resources. All other users can utilize the library of free resources on the Power BI support page for crowdsourced and self-guided troubleshooting.

Email: Users cannot email customer service directly.

Phone: Users cannot call customer service directly.

Training: Power BI has an extensive library of free guided learning courses to help users implement the system, perform specific tasks, integrate with the rest of the MS Office Suite and become proficient in the use of the system. Online classroom training is also available for between $175 and $300 per class.

Tickets: To access support, users can navigate to the support page and explore the free support options, including guided learning demos, blogs, samples, webinars, community forums and feedback. If their problem can’t be answered through these resources, Power BI Pro users can submit a support ticket through the user portal. If users discover a bug in the system, they can submit it to the technical team, and they will do their best to fix it in future updates.

Cost of Ownership for Microsoft Power BI

License/Subscription Cost	Based on the number of users for Power BI Pro and capacity-based pricing for Power BI Premium
Maintenance Cost	Included in the subscription cost
Installation/Implementation Cost	Included in the subscription cost. Additional charges may apply for data migration during implementation, maintaining on-premise data sources and building dashboards and reports
Customization Cost	Dependent on functional requirements and specific needs of the organization
Data Migration Cost/Change Management/Upfront Switching Cost	Dependent on your current software, amount of data to be migrated, availability of migration tools, complexity of data and gaps between the existing system and the new system.
Recurring/Renewal Costs	Renewal cost is included in the fees paid monthly or annually

Pricing & Cost Details

Includes Price/User and Minimum Commitment Terms for Power BI

Power BI Reviews & Pricing

What is Power BI?

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