Traditionally, Microsoft Excel has been considered as the go-to reporting tool for businesses. As the market is getting more & more competitive, organizations are looking for promising and actionable insights to drive business outcomes from their data. To cater to their needs, Microsoft offers Power BI, intelligent analytics and reporting tool that offer far greater insight than Excel.
Microsoft Power BI helps in connecting disparate sets of unstructured data, transforming data into structured data model to create charts or graphs that enable users to gain important insights to solve business problems. Furthermore, these charts or visuals can be shared with other Power BI users within the organization.
Let’s compare the advanced capabilities of Power BI with Excel
Access and Storage of Vast Amount of Data
With very impressive compression abilities for Excel and text/.csv files, Power BI enables users to view, analyze and visualize huge quantities of data that cannot be worked out in Excel. It is also very difficult to add or combine smaller .csv files to data, like sales data from different data sets for analysis using Excel. With powerful compression algorithm, Microsoft Power BI imports and caches the data within the .PBIX file with all granular details and summarizations existing in one file together and to be accessed through drill downs. Power BI also minimizes repetitive data preparation steps.
Spot Data Trends Quickly and Easily
Power BI enables users to monitor key performance indicators in real time to determine business opportunities. The beautiful and interactive dashboards with built-in time intelligence features take only seconds to view vast amounts of data. Users can use various dimensions and attributes, including date-time dimensions to identify data patterns.
Row Level Security Features
In Excel, adding Row Level Security (RLS) was quite complicated but can be done now even by non-coders. With “manage roles”, you can create roles for different groups to ensure that only authorized users can see data.
Personalized Dashboards
Power BI enables users to customize the size and layout of various visuals. With this capability, users get the flexibility to lay out the dashboard in a way that is most insightful to their specific role. These dashboards can further be shared with other users within the organization for further collaboration.
Thus, we can infer that Power BI is an intelligent tool specially designed for organizations into a data-driven culture. The powerful, self-serving capabilities of BI enable businesses to the gathering, transforming and analyzing data independently. Powerful features like dataset integration automation, ease of expansion into new data sources, rapid visualizations, and easy deployment of Row Level Security are few reasons that vehemently support Power BI as a necessity.
