My work involves a lot of data analysis and making that data accessible to a wider audience.
Through the years, I have used a lot of tools for data analysis and dashboarding like Excel, Tableau, BIRT etc. The new Microsoft product, PowerBI seems to combine the ease of Tableau and the power of BIRT to give very good looking, user friendly and low development effort dashboards.
The positives
Through the years, I have used a lot of tools for data analysis and dashboarding like Excel, Tableau, BIRT etc. The new Microsoft product, PowerBI seems to combine the ease of Tableau and the power of BIRT to give very good looking, user friendly and low development effort dashboards.
The positives
- Connects to all kinds of databases - excel, sql, web services etc
- Good support for prototyping
- Intuitive developer interface and quite a bit can be achieved by functional folks without the help of core technical expertise
- Large variety of inbuilt visualizations/ graphical representations considering the business use cases
- GUI is available for most business use cases
- Drill downs are easy. Some visualizations give you on the spot drill downs
- Exports to a powerpoint presentation
- DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) can be used to customize and apply data processing. Low learning curve
The not-so-positive
- It is still maturing so there are still some obvious reporting features which are getting added everyday. Like drill downs are there on limited visualizations
- Linking of one report to another as a drill down is still not available
- Formatting of charts like you are used to in Excel is limited, especially data label formatting
- The more number of records, the more time it takes currently. I understand from their blogs that they are constantly optimizing so lot to look forward to on that front
You can download the PowerBI developer desktop tool for free and get started with your dashboards. Happy dashboarding!
