Power BI Advantages Over Excel

Power BI Advantages Over Excel

Microsoft Power BI is a multi-functional business analytics solution that helps you visualize data, share insights across your organization, and even embed them in your app or website. With the ease of data access, visibility and sharing capabilities offered in this platform, various users are making the switch from more outdated tools like Microsoft Excel.

Most of us are familiar with Excel by now. From college students to business professionals, Excel has served as a traditional data source platform with enough functionality to get the job done. However, in this day and age, businesses are becoming more reliant on intelligent analytics and data interaction.

Power BI offers users working within the Microsoft platform the opportunity to capitalize on a more high-functioning tool. It can even interact with Excel and other data-based tools to ensure a seamless workflow. So what are the Power BI advantages over Excel? We’ll highlight the key components below so you can see for yourself!

Single Source of Truth – Workspace

• We all know it can be stressful receiving reports from different Managers, Analysts or even departments that don’t work together often. By building a Workspace in Power BI, you can give your company the advantage of structuring and associating data schema into one place.

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Row-Level

• Are you spending too much time building multiple reports for each stakeholder? For example, building a P&L report for each store can be time-consuming. By implementing Row-Level Security you can specify each set of data for a user or group. This means less analysis time needed, as just one view would be built for Power BI to deliver based on the predefined rules.

Cloud Service

• Save time involved in moving and sharing data. Data can be uploaded from multiple on-premise sources (Excel, DB, CSV, etc.) or reported directly from multiple cloud web services such as Azure, MailChimp, Zendesk, and Salesforce. Once uploaded, reports are accessible from any modern browser. Power BI also has dedicated apps for most popular devices, such as Windows, Android, and iOS.

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Q&A

• Do you know what you’re looking for, but don’t know where (or how) to find it? With Q&A, users can browse their data by typing questions into a Natural Language capability tool that Power BI has incorporated.

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Quick Insights

• Do you think there’s something happening in your company, but you’re unable to find out what? Quick Insights is a powerful algorithmic tool that automatically detects outliers, trends, correlations, majority, etc.

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Data Manipulation

• Is your spreadsheet so big that simply changing a cell takes forever? Power BI data model compression algorithm enhances the speed for data manipulation. Once the model is imported into the web service, Power BI brings the solutions of Azure Data Lake Gen 2. into play.

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Data – Driven Alerts

• Do you frequently look for specific amounts on your spreadsheet? Power BI users can create rules on specific reports and subscribe to those rules to receive an alert once they are met.

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Weekly Features

• Microsoft upgrades the Weekly Features tool every seven days. Through this upgrade, they usually compile new features and bug fixing for prior versions. This means you won’t need to wait months for hotfixes.

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Visualizations

• Sometimes we want to get straight to the point with a bar, pie or line chart. However, what happens when we want to look a little fancier in Excel? Power BI comes with various out-of-the-box visualizations, plus a free Marketplace with even more options.

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Mobile Accessibility

• We know Excel is available on all devices, but is it really user friendly? With Power BI, data analysts can create custom views of their reports for mobile devices. Why search through a spreadsheet on your phone if you can create a KPI view?

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Writeback Transactional Services (Power Apps)

• With this functionality users can capture data straight from a Power BI Report into a data warehouse, this is helpful when front end users need to capture data like targets, comments, etc. and store it on a centralize repository that other users can read.

Report Bursting (Power Automate)

• With this feature a report can be delivered to a list of users based on their roles. Let’s imagine you have a sales group for Canada and another for the US. This feature automates a daily delivery based on a SQL table or an Excel file which contains their email address and role assignation.

Smart Narratives (Natural Language)

• By using this feature, creators can add narratives to their report to address key takeaways, point out trends, edit the language, and format it to fit a specific audience. Instead of pasting a screenshot of their report in PowerPoint with key takeaways added, they can now add narratives to the report that are updated with every refresh. Your end-users can use the narratives to understand their data, get to the key points faster, and explain the data to others.

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Geo Filtering (Mobile Functionality)

• This is a Power BI Mobile feature which allows you to filter reports based on the location of the user. Let’s imagine you are a sales person and you are visiting one of your customers. This feature will help you get to their data without having to apply any type of slicing.

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Time to Make the Switch?

Our clients often inquire about Power BI advantages over Excel, and ask us if making the switch is truly worth it. Our response is this – it depends on what you’re trying to achieve! This article has hopefully served a helpful purpose, and gave you some high-level information regarding the benefits of Power BI.

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