7 Reasons why Power BI is a better BI tool than Excel

Everyone knows Excel. Some use it for a simple budget, others for building elaborate mathematical formulas. The program has been around since 1985, and we'd bet that everyone has used it at some point. It is often also one of the most important, or only, BI tools for companies. But since 2013 there has been another Microsoft program that is 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 would have to collect your data ad hoc and manually, for example by exporting it from systems and pasting it into Excel. With Power BI, all of this happens automatically by connecting the tool directly to the source or through a tool such as TimeXtender. This means you can continuously analyze up-to-date data, so you get current insights 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 put it on SharePoint. With Power BI, there is no longer any need to send round a new version every week or month, because Power BI works from a cloud environment and makes it easy to share a dashboard with your colleagues, so everyone looks at the same data rather than potentially outdated spreadsheets.

3. Power BI is secure

Because Excel was never really designed to serve as a BI tool, it also lacks security features. In principle, anyone with access to the file can view, or even edit, all the reports. When you use Power BI, it is easy to specify very precisely which user gets access to which data. For a single report, for example, different users can be given different permissions by assigning them different roles. You could, for instance, give account managers access only to their own figures and not those of their colleagues, without having to create a separate report for this.

4. Power BI is user-friendly

Excel's possibilities seem endless, which is why hardly any user knows everything about it. Because the program has so many complex features, it is also harder to learn and use.

Power BI, on the other hand, is remarkably easy to learn and use. You can quickly start building dashboards because it is fairly intuitive and also shares some similarities with Excel. The knowledge Excel users already have can therefore also be applied in Power BI, so there is no need to learn new applications or (coding) languages. At the same time, Power BI also lets you add more complex logic using DAX.

5. Power BI can handle large datasets

Big Data remains a popular term, and many companies are actively working with it. When it comes to Power BI versus Excel and processing Big Data, this is really only possible in Power BI.

Excel was not built to work with large datasets. When you work with Excel in a 32-bit environment, there is a limit of 2GB of data. In a 64-bit environment, on the other hand, there is no file size limit. The size of a workbook is then limited only by the available memory and system resources. [1]

With Power BI Pro, there is a storage limit of 100 GB per workspace. For app workspaces, however, total usage may not exceed the tenant's 10 GB storage limit (a tenant is a container in which all of a company's Microsoft online services are stored), multiplied by the number of Pro licences in the tenant. With a Premium subscription, you have a limit of 100 TB per Premium capacity and there is no per-user storage limit. [2]

6. Power BI has a better UI

The user interface (UI) of Power BI looks a lot better than Excel's. In Power BI, it is also very easy to make a report or dashboard visually appealing in no time. This is partly thanks to the many extensive data visualizations Power BI offers. It is also easy to create themes, for example using your company's colours. These are easy to share, so 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, Power BI lets you use advanced analytics by adding them to your models. By running R scripts and using R visuals, you get advanced custom visualizations, modelling and forecasting capabilities for analytics workflows.

7. Power BI can make a variety of data connections

With Power BI, it is very easy to set up data connections and combine them into a single overview. If, for example, you want to visualize your data from Google Analytics and your CRM system in Power BI, this is very easy thanks to the standard connectors Power BI offers. This is also possible with Excel, but Power BI has a larger number of connectors. For example, since April 2020 it is no longer possible to connect to Facebook from Excel.

It is also possible to display all these different data sources on 1 dashboard in 1 view.

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