Microsoft Excel has been the go-to reporting tool for businesses traditionally. But, Power BI offers powerful analytics and reporting features for organizations. Some of the advantages include faster experimentation with visualizations, statistical functions and calculations across broad datasets. Another advantage is the ability to derive answers on the fly through the rapid recombination of fields. And, it is clear that Power BI delivers better insights than Excel. Here are 9 reasons why should Excel users choose Power BI.
9 Reasons why should Excel users choose Power BI
1) The Excel – Power BI connection
Old-school Excel skills, but refreshingly new Power BI capabilities. The integration of Power BI with Excel helps to quickly create stunning interactive dashboards. Users can easily transfer Excel queries, data models, and reports to Power BI—without learning a new application or language. So, as Excel users choose Power BI, They use their Excel skills, and gain business intelligence.
2) Spot Data Trends Quickly and Easily
Analyzing trends with Power BI is extremely easy. It only takes seconds to view vast amounts of data with built-in time intelligence features. Also, Excel users choose Power BI and view data by various dimensions and attributes, including date-time dimensions. And, they can add advanced analytics to the models to know more about the data.
The user can easily create a date dimension table in seconds even if there is no date in a schema structure. Thereby, Power BI allows the time intelligence functions to work smoothly. Many business executives spend hours every month writing Excel macros across various large files to get comparisons in the form of a time series. They work across several large Excel files, be it through using VBA or other coding methods. So, Excel users choose Power BI to save time and know the data insights.
3) Intuitive UX Features
Power BI makes it easy to show something visually appealing with limited creativity or UX skills. Drag-and-drop functionality, easy resizing, and copying and pasting makes those who are familiar with the Microsoft Office suite feel right at home.
It is easier to create consistent branding and color schemas with Power BI themes. An organization’s branding department can now create a simple Power BI branding theme, and each analyst has only to import this theme during development. Then, they will all be creating graphs and charts that are consistent with one another in terms of coloring.
Also, Microsoft’s “Format Painter” feature will copy all formatting (such as color and font) across the visualizations. The ability to make format changes to individual visuals, like turning markers on for line charts and modifying the placement of data labels, allows people to create custom format changes. So, the visualizations can be more visually appealing and easier for dashboard viewers to follow.
4) Row Level Security Features
Adding Row Level Security (RLS) was previously complicated in Excel; it can now easily be done for different groups by non-coders. A good of example of using RLS is to ensure that employees can only see data relevant to their local geography. Adding these access filters is simple, and the risk of others seeing data they shouldn’t from mailing around an Excel file is eliminated.
The filters for different “roles” are set up within Power BI to set up RLS. Then, the individuals/ groups are added to the roles through the Power BI Service online. Next, select “Manage Roles” under the “Modeling” → “Security”. Also, you can establish roles for different groups, using DAX expression filters for different fields.
Once the report has been published to the Power BI Service, individuals or Office 365 groups can be added to different roles, through the Security option when right clicking on a dataset.
5) Use and share multiple workbooks in a single view
A single view of all the insights is a clear advantage of Power BI over Excel. Individuals can use and share multiple workbooks at the same time. Also, they can display a wide range of data, charts, and tables on a Power BI dashboard—combining data from multiple sources—by connecting Excel workbooks to Power BI.
6) Get self-service data visualization
Extend Excel data models to Power BI reports. Get rich and interactive visualizations with Power BI. The ability to query by asking natural language questions is an added advantage of Power BI. Also, empower colleagues of varying ability and experience levels—even Excel novices—to understand data insights and discover their own.
7) Go beyond Office 365
Power BI was designed to integrate with Microsoft technologies like Excel files, SharePoint docs or SQL databases. But, the tool is not exclusive to such systems now! It can consolidate and extract data from all other sources since it’s a cloud-based service. In fact, Power BI currently connects to 60+ common software solutions, including, amongst others Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, Google Analytics, Acumatica, Zendesk, MailChimp, Comscore, GitHub, Apache Hadoop, Marketo, QuickBooks and even Facebook. Thanks to access to a wider range of data users can leverage the insights better. Also, they can save a lot of operational time involved in moving and sharing data.
8) Leverage the power of predictive forecasting
The forecasting feature of Power BI utilizes built-in predictive forecasting models. It helps to automatically detect the trends (weekly/monthly /annually) in your data. Then, it enables to make predictions or estimates about the future. The tool looks at your data and selects the best algorithm to run the forecast. Also, it gives users the ability to apply artificial intelligence on their data.
9) Access a vast amount of data hassle-free
Most computers would struggle to open a 300-megabyte CSV file, making analysis and reporting in Excel a challenge. Adding several smaller CSV files to data, like sales data for neighboring regions, will be immensely difficult to combine with your previous dataset and analysis.
What if all the files were stored, connected, thoroughly analyzed, yet using only 50 MB? That’s now a reality with Power BI, which uses powerful compression algorithms to import and cache the data within the PBIX file.
Power BI enables users to view, analyze and visualize huge quantities of data that can’t be opened in Excel. Thanks to this impressive feature you don’t need to cut down in size large datasets to show more encompassing analysis anymore. Even the most detailed reports and summarizations can exist in one file and can be analyzed through drill downs.
Power BI can help your business shift to a culture of modern business intelligence and data driven decision making. Ease of expansion into new data sources, rapid visualizations, automation of dataset integration, and easily deployable Row Level Security are amongst the many reasons Excel users choose Power BI.
The cloud-based collaboration environment and features like Natural Language Query ensure better data governance. In the age of analytics, it’s important for organizations to intelligently utilize the data they collect to rapidly evolve with changing business and consumer habits.
The future is bright and shiny for analytics – companies are swarming to incorporate data visualization solutions, and to do away with tabular reports with huge reams of numbers. So, you too can be a Power BI super star for your organization! It’s time to go the Power BI way.