Power BI For Office 365 (discontinued)

If you want to create a visual dashboard or report that utilises various data sources then PowerBI can do this. It is great in that it takes your on-premises data and stores it on Microsoft servers where it can interact with it faster, reducing load on your own servers, while being efficient in what it transfers out. We have found it not well suited if you wanted to publish a simple report to many staff as they may all need a Pro license which can get expensive. Even if embedding the report onto a shared platform like SharePoint, it will not display if the users doesn't have a PowerBI Pro license.

Incentivized

• Ease of use. Most people have experience working with Excel. If you know how to create pivots, you can use Power BI.
• Data extraction and transformation (ETL). ETL is a joy with Power Query. It is intuitive, simple and a magical experience to transform poor data into something useful.
• Visuals. Power BI is beautiful to behold, especially Power View.
• Maps. The interactive maps are great built-in tools.
• Cost You cannot find anything cheaper than Power BI, unless you want to give it to every user in your company.

Incentivized

• Like many Microsoft products, you can get by with a small understanding of the product, but to truly realize the entire potential does take a while to learn.
• Hooking up SQL databases to the cloud version is a more complex than just querying right into the database from the desktop version.

Incentivized

If I were a small business owner, I would likely use Power BI for Office 365 for the sheer fact that I would get the Office licensing I need, along with powerful capabilities. As a Microsoft Partner, we continue to see Microsoft invest heavily in the Power BI capabilities, and will continue to implement and support BI solutions around this product, as we believe this is in the best interest of our clients.

We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.

Incentivized

as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.

Incentivized

One main competitor of Power BI is Tableau. Tableau has been around longer than Power BI so it can feel a little more refined in areas, however Power BI is catching up quickly. Tableau can be more expensive than Power BI. If you want more features and more refinement, and don't mind extra cost, then Tableau may be a better choice. But if you want something that's integrated with many things in O365, and are satisfied with fewer bells and whistles, Power BI may be the better option.

Incentivized

• As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
• One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.