5 min read
7 Reasons Why Power BI Is a Better BI Tool Than Excel
Everyone knows Excel. Some use it for a simple budget, others for creating extensive mathematical formulas. The program has been around since 1985, and we'd bet everyone has dealt with it at some point. Often it's also one of the most important, or the only, BI tool for companies. But since 2013 there's been another Microsoft program that's much better at processing data: Power BI. So why is Power BI a better BI tool than Excel? Read our 7 reasons below.
1. Power BI saves time
When you work with Power BI, the data is refreshed automatically. In Excel, you'd have to gather your data ad hoc and manually, for example by exporting it from systems and then pasting it into Excel. With Power BI, all of this is possible automatically by connecting the tool directly to the source, or via a tool such as TimeXtender. This means you can constantly work on analyzing up-to-date data, giving you faster access to current insights.
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By default, Power BI refreshes the data about 8 times a day (every 3 hours); with Power BI Premium it's possible to manually adjust this frequency. It's also possible with Power BI Premium to load data incrementally. This means only data that has changed in the past period is added to the dataset, instead of Power BI retrieving the entire dataset again. This way, reloading a dashboard/report can be even faster.
2. Power BI makes sharing easy
When you want to share a report with your colleagues in Excel, you send the latest version by email or place it on SharePoint. With Power BI, there's no longer any need to send around a new version weekly or monthly, because Power BI works from a cloud environment and it's easy to share a dashboard with your colleagues, with everyone looking at the same data instead of possibly outdated spreadsheets.
3. Power BI is secure
Because Excel wasn't really built to serve as a BI tool, the program also lacks security features. In principle, anyone who has access to the file can view, or even edit, all reports. When you use Power BI, it's easy to determine very precisely which user gets access to which data. For a report, for example, different users can be given different permissions by being assigned different roles. You could, for example, give account managers access only to their own figures and not those of colleagues, without having to create a separate report for this.
4. Power BI is user-friendly
Excel's capabilities seem endless, which means almost no user of the program knows everything about it. Because the program has so many complex capabilities, this also means it's harder to learn and use.
Power BI, on the other hand, is extremely simple to learn and use. You can quickly get started building dashboards because it's fairly intuitive to use and also shows similarities with Excel. The knowledge Excel users already have can therefore also be applied in Power BI. So there's no need to learn new applications or (coding) languages. On the other hand, Power BI also lets you add more complex elements using DAX.
5. Power BI can handle large datasets
Big Data remains a popular term, and many companies are fully engaged with it. When it comes to Power BI versus Excel and processing Big Data, this is really only possible in Power BI.
Excel isn't built to work with large sets of data. When you work with Excel in a 32-bit environment, there's a limit of 2GB of data. When you work with Excel in a 64-bit environment, however, there's no limit on file size. The size of a workbook is then only limited by the available amount of memory and system resources. [1]
With Power BI Pro, there's a storage limit of 100 GB per workspace. But for app workspaces, total usage may not exceed the tenant's storage limit of 10 GB (a tenant is a container in which all of a company's Microsoft online services are stored), multiplied by the number of Pro licenses in the tenant. With a Premium subscription you have a limit of 100 TB per Premium capacity and there's no storage limit per user. [2]
What is Big Data?
When talking about Big Data there are many different definitions, but according to Gartner it comes down to the following three factors: the volume of data, the velocity at which the data comes in, and the variety of the data. The latter means that the data is unstructured and can't be stored in a traditional database.
6. Power BI has a better UI
Power BI's user interface (UI) looks a lot better than Excel's. In Power BI it's also very easy to quickly make a report or dashboard look visually appealing. This is partly due to the many and extensive data visualizations Power BI offers. It's also easy to create certain themes, for example using your company's colors. These are easy to share so that, for example, your colleagues can use them too. This is of course a big difference from Excel, where you only have limited user-friendly formatting options.
In addition, in Power BI you can also use advanced analytics by adding them to your models. By running R scripts and using R visuals, you get advanced custom visualizations, modeling, and forecasting capabilities for analytics workflows.
7. Power BI can create various data connections
With Power BI it's very easy to create certain data connections and combine them into a single overview. For example, if you want to visualize your Google Analytics and CRM system data within Power BI, this is very easy thanks to the standard connectors Power BI has for this. This is also possible with Excel, but Power BI has a larger number of connectors. With Excel, for example, it's no longer possible to connect with Facebook as of April 2020.
It's also possible to display all these different data sources on 1 dashboard in a single view.
Want to know more about Power BI?
Check out our resource page for webinars, ebooks, whitepapers, and reports about Power BI, or contact us for a no-obligation (online) introduction or demo.
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