Thinking about moving from Excel to Power BI? Both of them are developed by Microsoft but have different capabilities and advantages. While spreadsheets offer more versatility, Power BI is better for complex data visualisations.
We asked seven business owners what convinced them to move away from Excel to adopt Power BI.
From handling vast datasets to sharing reports in real-time, their motivations differed.
Here are seven reasons to transition from Excel to Power BI:
Stay Ahead of Competition
To grow in business you need data tracking, and with Power BI you are able to spot data trends quickly and efficiently, giving you a view of data by a diverse set of dimensions and attributes, including date-time dimensions. These ultra time intelligence functions work to your advantage offering insight to ensure you're not left out in the cold.
Amit Raj, The Links Guy
Manage Large Datasets
For my purposes, Power BI is an ideal fit. We get to analyze large amounts of data on behalf of our clients and Power BI does this best. Due to the pandemic and working remotely, “teams” have increased. Power BI helps us work more as a unit despite our different locations. And the outcome is better represented in visual form for our clients.
Carol Tompkins, AccountsPortal
Share Dynamic Reports in Real Time
With Power BI I can share reports with other team members, create interactive reports, collaborate on reports in real-time, quickly analyze data using pre-built analytics. Without these abilities, Excel felt very limiting.
Matthew Ramirez, Paraphrasing Tool
Intuitive User Interface & Experience
The beauty of Power BI is how simple it is to create something visually appealing and impactful with little creativity or UX knowledge. Those familiar with Microsoft Office will feel right at home with the drag-and-drop functionality, easy resizing, and copying and pasting. You can effortlessly create consistent branding and colour schemes using Power BI themes. Your brand team can now create a simple Power BI brand theme in the form of an a.json file, and all graphs and charts can now be colour-coordinated across the company.
Axel Hernborg, Tripplo.com
Power BI Outperforms Excel
One of the greatest advantages of Power BI is its dashboards, which are much more visually appealing and interactive than Excel's. I feel like we also cannot underestimate the fact that Power BI is more user-friendly and easy to use than Excel, not to mention it runs faster and gives way fewer frustrations on the hardware side of things. Finally, Power BI can be used from mobile devices, while with Excel that is impossible.
Natalia Brzezinska, PhotoAiD
Row Level Security Features
Incorporating RLS, aka Row Level Security Features seems to be the most complicated thing in Excel. Nothing is more confusing than providing similar documented details to multiple people who need various limitations on what they can access. This is one of Excel's biggest limitations. It’s worth mentioning that there are added security risks in using Excel when you are emailing a similar document to anyone who needs access. Hence, it gets highly impossible to manage who observes what at that point. On the other hand, Power BI revolutionizes RSL as it’s easy to establish, and everything is online. Therefore, the annoying security risk is significantly reduced in comparison to Excel. Establishing RSL is as hassle-free as creating rolls for groups, utilizing DAX expression for numerous fields.
Jonathan Tian, Mobitrix
Leverage Data Visualisations
I moved from Excel because I wanted to see the data in a visual way and not just as a list of numbers. Power BI has made it so much easier for me to understand what I'm looking at without having to spend time on calculations or analysis.
Jennifer Schlette, KitchenSubstitute
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