The advantage to move from Excel to Power BI

Spreadsheets have been around since the early 1980s and the basic concept has remained the same with rows and columns that can contain data and calculations. It is a very powerful concept that allows for advanced calculations and analysis. 

But with collaboration around data and analysis becoming increasingly important, and the dramatic increase in the amount of available data, there have emerged new tools that are more visually competent and have a much better ability to handle multiple and large data sources, tools such as Power BI that is more focused on creating insights in the data. 

We are enthusiastic users of Excel and it is a fantastic application. But it’s not always the best solution, and when it comes to business intelligence, Microsoft Power BI is a much better application. 

The key areas of business intelligence where Excel is not the best tool are collaboration and sharing, visualization, and the ability to manage large amounts of data from different sources. This is partly because the way in which data is shared and displayed using files is outdated and insecure. 

Instead of mailing the updated excel file, or updating the file on a shared drive, and informing everyone of the updates, in Power BI it only takes a click to publish a dashboard. When the Power BI dashboard is published, it’s available to all people it has been shared with. If the underlying data is changed so is the Power BI dashboard, minimizing the risk of viewing outdated data. 

If the current reporting structure is very reliant on complex Excel spreadsheets, the Excel files can be used as a data source in the Power BI dashboard, thereby avoiding having to redo the whole analytical model and still achieving a much more flexible and secure data environment. 

Power BI is a powerful tool when it comes to visualizations. It is easy to create comprehensive and clear visualizations, and the graphs are interactive. Data can be filtered with dropdowns, but even easier by clicking in the graphs to drill down into the data. With a good layout in a dashboard, this drill down functionality becomes very intuitive and powerful. 

Managing data from different sources is complicated in Excel and something that very few people do. But in Power BI, it’s easy to manage different data sources and large data sets, or data that changes quickly. Power BI is built on the premise that an organization has a lot of data and that it exists in different systems and formats, and together this capability makes Power BI superior to Excel when it comes to data sources.