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Mid-market businesses in distribution, manufacturing and retail industries wanting to extend reporting and analysis capabilities of their ERP and drive more connected, accurate financial planing.
Power BI is used by developers, analysts, IT, and other businesses to visualize and analyze data on a unified interface.
The ease to use and train employees on this BI tool makes it best in the market. The power of building your own databases, customizing reports and the level of customer service is outstanding.
It was a bit difficult to understand the Sync/dbdesigner part since documentation on this was a bit vague.
I can show someone the basics in 5 to 10 minutes and they are off and running creating favorites and dashboards. The software is updated every month and their support and documentation is outstanding.
We have requested enhancements and we have some support issues that are submitted. But we have no visibility , (web portal), to review what we already submitted.
Additionally, the powerful and comprehensive capabilities of the software enable businesses to gain valuable insights into their operations and performance.
So much at once is hard to take in and learn all Phocas can give you. Too much data can be overwhelming.
Overall, I am genuinely happy with Phocas. I'm the kind of person who gets excited about report customization and flexibility within the way we structure our data.
They also don't have to rely on standard out of the box reports that can be limited in scope.
The Desktop Version is awesome, provides multiple connectors to different data sources and powerful modelling capabilities so that I format my data exactly how I want it.
I dislike the fact that so far we can't use multiple datasets as sources. Also if you are not familiar with DAX you have limited possibilities to run measures.
Its main advantage is the price, it is accessible for small companies and others. It also has a simple interface that allows users of other Office products a greater ease of use.
Comparing with other competitor products, its lack of features.
Ease to creating visualizations; excellent integration with other Microsoft applications and Google sheets. Support document is effective and easy to get.
It also bothers me a bit how slow it is to load specifically the desktop version, but this I can understand because I suppose it depends on the amount of data connected.
Overall my experience has been good with Power BI for my personal data analysis and visualization. I use it for analyzing finance and expenditures and it does a pretty good job at it.
The UI is clunky, the data model is not very intuitive to set up, performance is slow, especially compared to other tools. No build in box and whisker plots was a huge downside too.
Eric H.: Hi, my name is Eric. I'm a CFO, I give Power BI four stars. And for more reviews like this, please click below. Before Power BI, we used Tableau. We used it on a trial basis, and while it was all right, an early leader in this space, it just didn't integrate as well as Microsoft Power BI with the whole suite of products that we use as a company. We chose Power BI because it is easy to integrate with the rest of the Microsoft Office Suite, especially Excel. It has powerful analytics tools and it allows for some pretty cool graphics and dashboarding as part of that data visualization suite. It was relatively easy to get started with Microsoft Power BI. The integration with the rest of the Microsoft Office Suite really helps. There is some challenges though with data integration, making sure that the data is in the right format to be loaded into Power BI, but once you go from there, it's pretty easy and feels very intuitive if you're used to the rest of the Microsoft Office Suite. My advice for anyone looking to implement Microsoft Power BI would be to first watch some YouTube videos or take a tutorial or maybe even a class. Getting the data validation, data integration piece is really key to the functionality of the system. It can pull in some awesome graphics, some really good dashboards and analytics, but if you don't set up the data right, you'll never get it to work properly.
Prioritize real-user-identified key features according to your needs to find your best fit.
Phocas Software
Top FeaturesMicrosoft Power BI
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