Power BI

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “rebuilt a slow Power BI workflow into an Excel/Power Pivot version with documentation”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-07-01

• “We decided we hate Microsoft's Azure only Power BI Server licensing model since we're an AWS shop”

  NEGATIVE · Reddit · 2026-04-02

• “If I didn't need to use Power BI or connect to various data sources in Excel I would have requested a MacBook at work years ago.”

  NEGATIVE · integration · Hacker News · 2026-02-05

• “I was tired of spending hours in Excel/PowerBI just to visualize simple CSV data”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-12-27

• “Power BI ka naman dito at pwede mong paglaruan ang mukha ng data at pano isosort”

  POSITIVE · features · Reddit · 2025-08-07

• “Power BI skills are incredibly poorly suited to freelance work”

  NEGATIVE · Reddit · 2025-05-19

• “one more backward thinking feature of Power BI desktop is that it only works on Windows”

  NEGATIVE · features · Reddit · 2025-05-19

• “I managed to transform many reports from Excel to Power BI and based on my calculations I have saved 400+ hrs of full time work by automating and changing reporting my area”

  POSITIVE · performance · Reddit · 2025-05-18

• “as a visualization tool, Excel is definitely not better than Power BI”

  POSITIVE · features · Reddit · 2025-05-16

• “I like working in Visual Studio with SSAS models better than in Power BI”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Reddit · 2025-05-16

• “when I make changes to Excel, nothing happens to Power BI unless I manually hit refresh in Power BI”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Reddit · 2025-05-16

• “The performance in DirectQuery mode (which means connecting directly to the database) is very bad in most cases and a lot of features from Power BI are not available there.”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Reddit · 2025-05-16

• “Power BI is much better tool because of it's integration into M365”

  MIXED · integration · Reddit · 2025-05-16

• “Power BI is great because it can provide an abstraction layer (a semantic model) on top of the many various data sources that might be pushed into a report. You're free to combine data from Excel with msSql or random Json, and it all plays together nicely in the same report. You can do data cleaning in the import stage, and the dimension/fact-tables pattern has been able to solve the wide variety of challenges that I've thrown at it. All this means that the PowerBI reports I've made have been far more adaptable to changes than the other tightly coupled solutions I've used.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2024-09-26