Power BI

[ickyflex]

Does anyone use Power BI regularly at work? Would you recommend it as something to learn on a go forward basis for development and value add.

Just seems to be the new thing, determining whether it's something I want to pick up in my spare time as a skill

[Lex350]

My wife works in benefits and regulatory for Duke Energy. She publishes all her reports in Power BI now.

[firebane]

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Does anyone use Power BI regularly at work? Would you recommend it as something to learn on a go forward basis for development and value add.

Just seems to be the new thing, determining whether it's something I want to pick up in my spare time as a skill

Its definitely a good soft skill to invest in. Its basically a way to take raw data and make it all pretty to view.

Our company uses Power BI for a ton of stuff.

[sabad66]

Yes, very worth it especially if you're responsible for producing reports. Once you get everything set up and linked to your data sources, it can save you a lot of time to produce new monthly/daily/quarterly reports/dashboards.

[finboy]

The power bi user group in calgary is a good way to learn more and see what others are using it for. Chris Sorensen runs it, he was an instructor of mine at SAIT and is happy to see newcomers.

I’m far removed from report building in my current role but agree it is a great skill to have.

[bjstare]

Yes.

[Mogg]

Has anyone used both Power Bi and Tableau? How do they compare?


I use Tableau at work, but have heard good things about Power Bi.

[finboy]

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Has anyone used both Power Bi and Tableau? How do they compare?


I use Tableau at work, but have heard good things about Power Bi.

Briefly, both seem relatively comparable, but I would say power bi is a bit more user friendly for those used to excel.

[mr2mike]

Power BI is cheap so companies can use it, etc.
Tableau licenses are costly so less company buy in for it.

I think on the overall, Tableau is a stronger software suite but definitely a steep learning curve unless you have a CompSci background for coding. Tableau now has Tableau Prep to help clean up your datasets prior to importing to Tableau to work with it. Seems like it will clean up the obvious issues with taking data into Tableau then generating formulas/code to remove the data points that have issues.

Power BI, if you want to link s/s together and do stuff like that it seems fairly intuitive and obviously works with Excel easily since they're both Microsoft products.

My thought is learn Power BI then switch to Tableau might be easier. Tableau to Power BI, no issues since Tableau is more compliated.

[killramos]

Spotfire is a pretty good option.

I am pretty chained to excel personally though so BI might be worth a try.

[schurchill39]

I recently started using Power BI at work to help visualize large data sets and I find it pretty tricky to work with. Once you kind of figure out how to use certain elements of it you can at least make something that looks nice but it really lacks a lot of the customization that I would expect (full disclosure, this may also be simply user error and 100% on me for not understanding the program). It makes way better graphics than excel, and the fact you can tie elements together so if I click on a graph it highlights the corresponding data in other graphs is incredible.

A big issue I have with it is that most of my data for the time being is fed into it from excel and its very very particular with how that data looks. If you do something as simple as adjust the spelling of a column header then go to refresh your data it will give you an error and you're basically fucked. At least that's the way it seems. If you're pulling data from a SQL server or something it might be better but so far I've only played with huge data dumps of public data in CSV format where I basically need to either restart everything if I need to tweak anything in the data file (working with raw data in power bi is a nightmare)

I'm also not a fan of the fact that the only way for me to export graphics without snipping is to publish my project from my desktop version of Power BI to my office 365 "workspace" then sign into the online version and export from there.

Most of the companies I have dealt with that have any horsepower in data analytics seem to be using spotfire. NCS has a crazy report system built using it for all of their tools and components and Crescent Point, Nexen, and Repsol all do pretty major data projects with it as well. It looks like Spotfire and Power BI are similar softwares but Spotfire seems like its probably more user friendly for us regular folk (again, I could be talking out of my ass. This is just what I've seen).

[macman64]

We are using PowerBI - it can add up so make sure to understand the license models.