How Power BI is Better than Excel?
Analysis of business data is essential to make it big as far as commerce is concerned. Be it a small enterprise or a multinational company looking to widen its reach. Several businesses are waking up and realizing the significance of data analysis. Two of the most common used tools are Power BI and excel, choosing the right one to work with can be a bit cumbersome.
What is Power BI tool?
Power BI is a product from Microsoft, which focuses on processing data associated with a business. To be more specific, it is a toolset that caters to the deeper demographics of a business, and its functional operations. It is often compared to Excel, as both are very similar in what they do. There are quite some differences as visualization in Power BI is far more appealing for instance, reports also are more concise.
Power BI Advantages
Power BI has a couple of advantages over Excel:
1. Exclusive data visualization tool
2. Designed keeping business intelligence as the focus
3. Handles large chunks of data easily
4. Can be used on mobile devices
5. Connects to several data sources
6. Quicker processing
7. Customizable dashboards
8. Better interactivity
9. Appealing visualization
10. In-depth comparison of data files and reports
11. User friendly
12. Actionable insights can be achieved thanks to incredible data visualization.
13. Facilitates the exploring of data via natural language query.
Excel and its most common uses
Microsoft Excel is ideal in many ways
1. Faster calculations: making formulas in data and doing calculations is quick work with Excel.
2. Versatility: users don’t have to switch to another app due to its versatility.
3. Table creation: complex tables can be created for advanced calculations.
Why Power BI is highly preferred?
One of the reasons it’s the go-to tool is that Power BI dashboard can be accessed on a mobile device and can be shared among co-workers. Although a dashboard contains a single page, Power BI report allow for more than one page. Data interrogation is possible with dashboards.
Power BI uses a combo of dashboards and reports for specific usage. Monitoring a business gets easier as various metrics are available to analyze and look for answers. Integration of cloud and on-premises data gives a compact view regardless of data location.
Apart from its appealing looks, the tiles appear dynamic and change alongside the circulating data to facilitate updates. Prebuilt reports are also available for SaaS solutions. Secure environment, quick deployment, and hybrid configuration are a big plus of Power BI.
Packed with versatile tools
There are a bunch of Power BI tools that allow better interactivity
1. Data gateway: installed via admin, it acts as a bridge between on-premise data sources such as Live Query and Power BI service.
2. Service: an online software service, where admin sharing occurs via cloud. Dashboard, data models, and reports also get hosted.
3. Desktop: Primary tool for publishing and authoring. Used by developers for creating reports and models.
4. Report server: hosts several types of reports including mobile, Power BI, paginated, and KPIs. Gets updated every fourth month, as IT professionals manage it.
5. Mobile apps: made for windows, Android and iOS. On the report server, users can view the dashboard and reports.
Power BI filters and Data sorting
The filters in Power BI allow for refined results to appear based on value selection. Some commonly used filters are:
1. Report level
2. Visual level
3. Automatic
4. Page-level
5. Drill-through
6. Cross drill
What’s better is that users get both basic and advanced modes of utilizing the filters to get the desired results.
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More factors that make Power BI the first choice
1. Q/A and custom pack
2. Quick spotting of Data trends
3. Available on the go access
4. Scheduling Data refresh
5. Intuitive and better UX features
6. Storing, analyzing, accessing huge amounts of data without hassles
7. Data integration into a centralized dashboard
8. Forecasting via inbuilt predictive models
9. Security features (row-level)
10. Various cloud services integration
11. Access control
Apart from the listed plus points, one can also use Power BI API which allows pushing data into a set, rows to a table can be further added. The data then shows up in dashboard tiles as a visual in the reports.
Conclusion
Power BI is the right choice compared to excel when the target is
1. Maneuvering large data for insights
2. Creating complex, graphically interactive visualizations
3. Making tabular format reports
4. Collaborative teamwork
5. Dealing in business intelligence and profound data analysis
