Why choose Power BI

By grabbing this book, there’s a bit of an assumption that you have already made the decision that Power BI is the tool you or your organization has chosen. If for some reason you are still on the fence, or perhaps Power BI is one of many business intelligence tools your organization uses, then it’s helpful to have an understanding of why so many have already made Power BI their data analytics tool of choice.

Let’s start with collaboration. One of Power BI’s central goals is to get data in the hands of decision-makers. So even though Power BI does come with a central cloud-based portal that users can visit, it may not make sense to give users a new web page to bookmark in their browser. Collaboration really means bringing Power BI to where your users are rather than forcing them to go somewhere new. The way Power BI does this is with integration into many of the tools you know and love from Microsoft like SharePoint, Excel, PowerPoint, Dynamics, Teams, and even your mobile phone. Within each of these tools, Power BI allows collaboration and discussion to occur around the data visualized on reports. This idea of bringing data to where your users already are is one of the significant ways Power BI helps grow a data culture.

Another reason many are drawn to Power BI is because of its ease of use. As you work your way through this book, you will find that Power BI has a very intuitive interface. It allows you to quickly connect to data, build data cleansing transformations, create relationships between data sources, and visualize your data in minutes. More complex problems can take longer of course, but Power BI tends to follow this 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the problems you encounter in Power BI can be solved with a 20 percent level of Power BI knowledge. The deeper knowledge is important of course, but the times you will actually need it are far rarer.

One of the major considerations when picking a business intelligence tool is price. Fortunately, when comparing many of the other top tools on the market, Power BI wins on cost hands down. The competitor with the closest feature parity is seven times more expensive than Power BI for basic report development.

It is important to note that licensing costs can vary depending on your specific needs so this chapter won’t go into more detail on it here. However, we would recommend reviewing licensing details here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/.

If these reasons aren’t enough, look at the unbiased annual survey performed by Gartner for analytics and BI platforms. Gartner Inc. is a well-recognized technology research firm that conducts research on technologies, which it shares with the public. Power BI continually rates as the highest tool on the market in the categories of “Completeness of Vision” and “Ability to Execute.”