How Power BI can stand ahead of other tools in the BI market even founded in 2014?
Even though the business intelligence tools market is highly competitive, Power BI is at the top position when it comes to choosing BI tools. So, what is the reason behind Power BI being the most popular in the market? Why do businesses prefer Power BI over other tools?
Knowing the pros and cons of Power BI helps you to understand why the Power BI tool is popular. And, also help you to know whether the Microsoft Power BI business tool is right for your business or not.
Advantages of Microsoft Power BI That You Should Know
Data analytics dashboard development company explains the top Power BI advantages you must know to understand Power BI’s potential.
- Cost-Effective Tool to Use for Data Analytics
The Power BI desktop version is free to use. The Power BI desktop version helps individuals to work on small projects. Power BI Pro and Power BI premium versions cost $13.70 and $27.50 per user/month, respectively.
- Offers Power Query Editor for Easy Data Transformation
Power Query Editor for Easy Data Transformation allows you to modify and manipulate multiple data sets when importing data. In short, Power Query Editor is a data container that temporarily stores data before it’s used to create a Power BI dashboard.
- Learning Curve
Power BI is easy to use. It’s Excel pivot tables with Excel’s data visualization tools taken to the next level. Power BI reports can have slicers to focus reports on data from a specific timeframe or data that meets certain criteria. Once you get data into a Power BI dataset, making charts, graphs, and tables that make sense of the data is not that complex.
- Easy and Fast Learning Curve
Learning the Power BI application will seem challenging at first but its learning curve is short and easy. If you have previous experience with Excel or other BI tools, then Power BI becomes handy to use.
- Integration with Microsoft Excel
For starters, you can use Excel tools to analyze data in Power BI. And, use Power BI tools to visualize the data in Excel. Connecting your Excel workbooks to Power BI allows you to display a wide range of reports, charts, tables, and data in a single-view dashboard.
- Monthly Updates to Offer Better and New Features
Power BI’s software development team actively listens to its customers. Every time users complain about a feature, they improve it or bring in better systems. They also improved Power BI security along with the display name for fields.
Limitations of Microsoft Power BI That You Should Know
- No Data Cleaning Service
There are no in-built data cleaning services in Power BI. This means the Power BI interface automatically assumes the data to be clean and organized. Therefore, before you pull data to create the Power BI dashboards, you need to check the quality of the data and clean it.
- The User Interface
Power Bi has a very bulky user interface. The side par and formula help windows can often block the view of vital. Making a scrolling dashboard can require some effort but it would be nice if this was a native feature.
- Data Handling Capacity for Free Versions
Another con is the ability to work with huge amounts of data. Power BI has a limit on the amount of data it can ingest. After the data hit the limit, you have to upgrade to the paid version of Power BI. Also, ingesting millions of rows of data takes a long time.
- Performance Issues When Handling Massive Data Volumes
Handling large volumes of data is one of the biggest limitations of Power BI service. It is not that Power BI services cannot analyze it. It just takes a long time to go through the larger data sets.
And if you are processing over 20000 rows, it might even crash. To bypass this issue, create multiple queries to split the data into smaller chunks.
- Visuals Configurability
Although the native visuals and to a large part the custom visuals are not configurable. There is often a desire to optimize a visual but there are limitations to what can be changed.
- Complex to Understand the Entire Tool
While learning the basics of Power BI is easy, it can be quite challenging to master the tool. The deeper you go, the more complex the software becomes. Sometimes, you have to rely on external tools like the DAX Studio.
Conclusion
As we see, the advantages of using Power BI as your organization’s preferred business intelligence tool far outweigh its limitations. Its monthly updates, easy-to-understand interface, Artificial Intelligence support, and integration capabilities with Microsoft Excel make it a powerful data analytics platform. Therefore, like most users, if you are looking for a business intelligence and data visualization tool to scale your business, you can confidently go with Power BI.