No problem, Main points: End users don’t need specific versions of MS Office - Trying to get everyone in a large organsiation on the right version of Office (and associated service packs) in order to share Power BI content is a nightmare. Reports are interactive - users with the SAS analytics plugin can filter and drill into reports. The MS functionality just produces static images in PowerPoint (and its still only a preview feature). MS have confirmed they have no plans to develop this either so users need to be linked across to the web reports. Reports can easily be shared with users that don’t have the SAS analytics plugin SAS is on prem, Power BI is still cloud only (as far as I'm aware) and you need a licence for every user that you want to share reports with. Excel Power BI functionality is widely regarded to be extremely buggy at the moment, 2016 update made things worse. SAS plugin is more stable (although doesn't play nicely if you use it along side Power BI in Excel) There are more but I stopped comparing once I got the SAS add in up and running as the points above are key for us. The one feature that I have found to be better in the MS offering is the ability to create a full data model in Power BI then link it directly to Excel, it means you can create a very complex model with lots of tables and measures and re-use across multiple Excel workbooks and PBI reports. SAS doesn’t do data models in VA at all.
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