In today’s digital space, data keeps a great relevance among businesses. With in-depth data analysis, businesses can make well-defined strategies that bring amazing results. This is why many late organizations are often searching for the right tool that helps them perform data analysis hassle-free. Power BI comes as the right option for them.
Before delving into the pros and cons of Power BI, let’s grasp some basics.
An Overview of Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is a top-rated data visualization tool developed by the leading software giant Microsoft. Be it analyzing, organizing, integrating, or aggregating data; it allows businesses to do everything. The tool enables businesses to create various data-intensive reports, shared gathered data, dashboards, etc.
One can use Microsoft Power BI for the conversion of raw data into meaningful information with the use of tables and intuitive visualization. The tool makes data analysis less time-consuming and helps you make the right business decision accordingly.
Pros of Microsoft Power BI
Now, it’s time to discuss the pros of Microsoft Power BI for data visualization. Take a look.
1. Perfect Excel Integration
One of the advantages of Power BI is that it brings the possibility of uploading and viewing data in Excel. With the tool, you will get an option to choose, slice, and filter the data in the Dashboard of the Power BI report and then put it in your excel sheet. You can access the excel spreadsheet and visualize data in a complete tabular form.
2. Connect with Multiple Data Sources
Another advantage of Microsoft Power BI is that it includes the capability of connecting with various data sources. It can read data from text files such as JSON, XML, etc, and also from Microsoft Excel. You can connect this tool to SQL servers and other databases.
The tool can read data most effectively directly from Azure, Facebook, Google Analytics, and more. It allows you to pull data from your desired sources and store the same for analysis. Microsoft endeavors to add even more data sources to improve this tool’s capability.
3. Easy Learning Curve
Those who want to learn Microsoft Power BI will not face many challenges. There’s the possibility that they can face certain challenges at the beginning. Meanwhile, those who have already experienced using other similar tools or Excel will certainly not face any difficulty in using this tool. Beginners need to spend at least 6 months to 1 year to grasp this tool. Microsoft also offers an extensive training program to help especially those of new users to become used to it.
4. Smooth Data Transformation
The credit goes to Power Query Editor which enables users to modify and also manipulate different data sets when they import the data. It comes as a data container that stores data temporarily before you use it to create a Power BI dashboard. In this phase, you can arrange and clean data. It also allows you to unpivot and pivot columns as well.
5. Cost-Effective
Cost-effectiveness is another major advantage of this software. When it comes to Power BI Desktop, it’s available free of cost. You need to simply download and install the software to use it. Meanwhile, if you seek to use Power BI services and also publish your reports on the cloud, you need to spend $9.99 per user on a monthly basis for the Power BI Cloud service solution. Therefore, Power BI is available at a fair price when you compare it with other software.
Cons of Microsoft Power BI
Apart from various advantages, Microsoft Power BI has certain limitations as well. Some of these limitations are as follows.
1. Absence of Data Cleaning Feature
When it comes to data cleaning services, the tool doesn’t include them. So, you must check the data quality when you pull the data for creating the Power BI dashboard. It’s better to clean data before using it. All you need to do is to use Power Query Editor to get over this kind of limitation. It gathers and performs data cleaning before transferring it to this tool.
2. Complicated to Grasp the Tool
Well, it’s the truth! Of course, you will face no difficulty when it comes to learning the basics of this tool. But, mastering the tool is indeed quite difficult. The deeper you go, the more complications you will come across. You need to depend on certain external tools sometimes as well. This external tool is DAX studio. All you need to do is to learn the functions of this tool.
3. Compatibility Limitation
Another drawback of Power BI is its limited compatibility. The software runs with perfection on different platforms including Android, iOS, and Windows. Meanwhile, it doesn’t work with the desktop version of Linux or Mac. Indeed, opting for the web version is good. But, it can also slow the performance and also includes limited functionality.
4. Unable to handle Larger Volume of Data
Handling a larger volume of data adversely impacts the performance of Microsoft Power BI development. And it’s another biggest limitation of this software. It’s not because this tool is not capable of analyzing BI services. But, it takes a long time to go through a large volume of data. If you process 20000+ rows, it causes a crash. To overcome any such issue, you need to create different issues for splitting data into different small chunks.
5. Confusing Pricing and License
The pricing structure of this software is not fully clear and is quite confusing for everyone. If we talk about the pro version, it’s available with advanced functionalities, especially when you compare it with the Desktop version.
Meanwhile, you should know that different tiers of the premium version of this software don’t provide you more features compared to the pro version but also can add more processing/storage capacity. But, other persons in your organization can get the facility to use the content only but will not be able to create without a Pro license.
Final Words
So, after going through the above advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft Power BI, you may have already found some reasons to use it for your business. So, if you are looking for a perfect tool for data visualization, Power BI can be the right option for you.