Today’s organizations deal with enormous amounts of data. Analyzing that data is a key to better performance and valuable business insights. What’s the best approach? Although Excel is useful for insight into early, raw data, Microsoft Power BI is more of a business intelligence tool that helps users visualize data from multiple sources

Here’s a rundown of the main benefits of Power BI over Excel.

What Power BI Does that Excel Can’t

Data Volume and Simplicity
Power BI can handle huge volumes and varieties of data, subject to design and environmental constraints. Tables can be loaded and correlated based upon communal fields. The Power Query Editor and the Data Modelling sections have easy-to-use, intuitive interfaces.

Data Connectivity and Auto-Refresh
Reports can be connected with heterogeneous data sources (discrete databases), infrastructure (on-prem, cloud), social media, CRMs, and the like far more efficiently with Power BI. The time consumed by the ODBC Driver of Excel for data import is at the high end compared with Power BI Workbook.

Auto-refresh keeps the data in sync with the connected source. Refresh Now and Scheduled Refresh option keeps all reports updated.

Reports and Cross-Filtering
Users can develop graphic reports easily, ensuring visually-appealing, professional results.

Cross-filtering is not available in Excel, it is in Power BI. This allows users to decide the flow for filtering data between tables.

Alerts and Emails
Once a dashboard is created, email alerts can be set up on KPIs eg, alert when inventory falls down, Creation of such alert and triggering an email when a condition is met is made very simpler. Where in Excel, we have to create macros using the VBA editor for sending an email or a reminder.

Other Features

Natural Language Query
NLQ lets users get answers through Power BI Service. This feature is useful to users who aren’t familiar with data models and have no time to play with reports.

Row Level Security
Adding Row Level Security (RLS) is a challenge in Excel. With Power BI, even non-coders can add RLS for different groups. RLS can be implemented to ensure that employees can only see data relevant to their local geography.

Download and Export of Dashboards
Users can download dashboards or export the reports to PowerPoint, PDF, or printers.

Power BI, Excel, or Both?

A data-driven world demands an efficient, effective data analytics tool. Companies are clamoring for data visualization and to do away with tabular reports containing hundreds of pages of numbers.

Business users can use Power BI without having to ask IT to analyze their data. Automation of dataset integration, ease of expansion into new data sources, rapid visualizations, and easily-deployable Row Level Security all make Power BI a necessity

To improve your data organization and analytics, contact Tek Leaders today. We create custom data storage, analysis, and visualization systems based on individual workflows and business strategies. If you have questions about how to use Power BI merge queries and other data analysis tools more effectively, you can reach us by email directly.