
Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter - jerianasmith
http://www.ishir.com/blog/4621/power-bi-microsofts-business-intelligence-set-tools-getting-smarter.htm/
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nhance
I've recently switched to start working with Microsoft products, with both
this and their Dynamics 365 platform. It really seems like there's a huge
opportunity here for guys like me to bring years of experience hacking on UNIX
systems into the Microsoft world because there's a lot of "this is how it's
done" and legacy systems thinking.

Many of the developers I've seen working in this space seem a few years
behind, so I'm excited to see this published here. Gives me faith that I'm
making the right call (even if it is a bit painful to develop for these
things. XML and all.)

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gaius
I'm curious too, what you mean here. Azure is cutting edge, HDinsight is world
class. The stuff they are doing with R is great. Even Excel probably does a
lot of things you don't realize, do you know it comes with a built-in in-
memory columnar DB and a Facebook client now?

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dragonwriter
> Even Excel probably does a lot of things you don't realize, do you know it
> comes with a built-in in-memory columnar DB

...if you have the right Office tier.

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ZenoArrow
Which Office tier doesn't come with the Power BI tools in Excel?

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vijucat
I found Power BI's natural language Q & A to be the real killer feature that
Tableau, et al currently don't have.

[https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-
se...](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-how-
to-use-q-and-a/)

It actually works 90% of the time and helps you answer fairly complicated
questions about your data set, visualize them and add them to your dashboard.

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karmicthreat
I recently compared Qlik, Power BI and Tableau as a reporting system for our
customers. I would say Qlik was the most eager out of the 3. They got me in
contact with their OEM team and were very forthcoming with information.
Microsoft gives you all the information you could want up front. Tableau never
responded.

Power BI also has Power BI embedded for Azure services which bills report
views on a per session basis. This might be what wins me over to Power BI if
it makes financial sense.

R also has [https://shiny.rstudio.com/](https://shiny.rstudio.com/) which is
pretty neat as well.

In the end we would like our small/medium sized customers to build on top of
this platform so we will probably stick to one of the big 3 rather than
completely roll our own.

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samch
Just curious why Tibco Spotfire was omitted from your process. If you're
looking at Qlik, Spotfire is pretty feature-similar.

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karmicthreat
Because I didn't know anyone that had used it. Nor had it come up in other
conversations. At 200$/User it is probably going to be out of our price range.

Thanks for pointing it out though. I will dig around and see if it is a
contender for our use case.

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tryitnow
Pretty much everything mentioned in this post is standard fare among the major
self-service BI vendors now - and if they don't have it it's on their roadmap.

I would say the big advantages of Power BI are 1) Cost: In some cases it's an
almost 5:1 cost advantage 2) User Community: Far more important than costs.
There's a ton of third-party resources (books, blogs, forums, etc) on how to
get the most out of Power BI's underlying technologies: DAX and M. I think
you're going to be more likely to find a Power BI meetup in your city than one
for another BI vendor.

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arethuza
I'd say that biggest advantage Power BI has is that its plugged right into the
Office 365/Azure world.

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dmlab
We recently looked over PowerBI and it didn't cut it. Crude mapcharts &
limited viz capabilities. Lots of tools feature R integration. If your small
to medium organization goes down the MS dynamix route then it may be
worthwhile. There was a lot of potential there but not enough finished
features to move us off the hybrid BI approach.

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jerianasmith
Have you tried free or Premium Version ? There are many more options with
Premium Version.It's better to talk to experts before forming one's opinion.

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arethuza
I was pretty impressed how easy it is to create new custom visuals for Power
BI in R.

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alexilliamson
The integration with R is awesome. I was amazed to see that you can create a
chart with R code - with ggplot for instance - along side "native" power BI
charts, and the ggplot graphic responds to filters and other report-level
manipulation the same as others. Do other BI products do this?

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scottmcdot
I believe Qlik Sense has an R plugin but you'd need to have the R session
running somewhere.

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scottmcdot
I work for a large organisation using Qlikview and there is currently a
migration underway to Qlik Sense. To me, Power BI looks similar to the
features that Qlik Sense provides. Is anyone out there considering moving from
Qlik to Power BI?

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jerianasmith
Hi Scott,

Though I'm not moving to Qlik but has read about comparisons between top few
analytics tools including Qlik, Power BI, Tableau, QS etc. Out of all,
QlikView is highly adaptable and provides wide-ranging deep analytics. It also
has integrations to Deltek products, so if you use Deltek for time & expense
or earned value management (EVM) reporting, QlikView is a natural choice.
Overall, QlikView also continues to have one of the industry’s highest
customer satisfaction ratings.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s Power BI is inexpensive and plugs-in seamlessly
with MS Office. It is a solid option if you need quick access to specific
analytics or intensive reporting (and have personnel who are skilled in MS-
based data queries). In the long run it may challenge QlikView, Tableau or
other analytics tools. Microsoft Power BI is the only one of these three data
visualization and analytics apps that have extensive R and big data-related
integrations, ensuring this specific apps’ scalability for larger projects.

