Excel is by far the most utilized spreadsheet and data tool in the world with over 1 billion instances in use. It can be argued that Excel is one of, if not the most user-friendly spreadsheet tools in the world. Most business professionals are familiar with Excel and Excel has served as a traditional data source platform with enough functionality to get the job done. However, Excel comes with some shortcomings that should not be neglected.
For a single user, to work with small amounts of data and create visuals in Excel is straightforward. However, Excel lacks true sharing and collaboration capabilities, and certainly lacks the security controls for safe sharing and collaboration. All this because Excel is still centered around personal use – in good and bad.
Power BI offers powerful analytics and reporting features for organizations. With faster experimentation with visualizations, statistical functions and calculations, support for large datasets, it is obvious that Power BI can deliver far greater insight than Excel. All this is good and known by many users of Power BI. But if you operate in an environment that is regulated and/or handling sensitive information, there is more to Power BI that makes it excel over Excel.
Single Source of Truth
We all know it can be troubling to work collaborative on reports based on Excel. Even with a common drive for all files, it tends to be hard to know that the report is based on the last version of everything.
With Power BI, all data is one centralized source for data management and insights. This is excellent compared to Excel, since Excel files can float around in a company, on various drives and emails. Excel is not a centralized platform, even though it can be cloud-based, since there are no workspaces and places to view updated reports. Power BI has a single source of truth embedded into the core of the architecture. This makes all users see the same information at all times which helps reduce silos that can be problematic and get the organization to work data-driven.
This way you eliminate a lot of risk and sharing limitations, and most importantly, you can use your data effectively for the good of your business.
Security
Power BI is built to provide complete and hermetic protection of data. Power BI has earned the highest security classifications available in the industry and is already trusted by industries with high security standards like financial institution, health care and government agency.
By not directly exposing the underlying data, Power BI makes it easy and safe to share data within, and outside an organization. Power BI is integrated with Microsoft Purview Information Protection (part of Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance Suite). This enables your organization to have a single, integrated solution for classification, labeling, auditing, and compliance of data.
In addition, Power BI comes with data security options such as user-level security and row-level security that help you restrict access to private data, making it less likely that the information will fall into the wrong hands. Excel, on the other hand, does not have these security features. While you can apply password protection to workbooks, sheets, and cells, the underlying data can still be exposed.
Conclusion
Both Power BI and Excel have their use cases. But if you are working with sensitive data in a collaborative manner, Power BI is your best option. Does your business have Excel sheets that are used for sharing insight and reporting? Please contact us at Decision Labs to get more collaborative, correct, and secure reporting.
