Successful organisations increasingly rely on data to drive performance and improve competitiveness. It is important you choose the right data analysis tool to ensure your organisation gains the business intelligence advantage it needs.
We have been advising our clients to move from Microsoft Excel to Microsoft Power BI as it offers faster and more detailed insights, which are presented more clearly than Excel. The move is saving our clients time and money and delivering real-time actionable insights that are improving business intelligence and performance.
Compare Excel with Power BI
Historically organisations have used Microsoft Excel to build business insights. Using a spreadsheet format the Excel program performs calculations and can transform data sets into visual information. However, Power BI has a more specific business intelligence objective than Excel. As well as being able to connect with a large number of data sources, it has high graphic and data transformation capabilities.
It also significantly reduces the data management workload for our clients as well as the risk of human error. It also comes with faster experimentation with visualization, calculations and statistical functions across vast data sets.
8 Reasons why Power BI is better than Excel
1. Better data storage with Power BI
There are limitations to the volume of data you can hold and access with Excel which can impact its effectiveness. Power BI can hold up to 1GB of storage, it is an unrivalled data analysis tool for a competitive environment demanding clear up to date insights.
2. Power BI manages more data in less time
The built-in features in Power BI make analysis and visualization of large amounts of data much easier. You can sync data and view by various dimensions including time and data dimensions. Our team at ProCloud work with our clients to create time trend analysis for them in Power BI. This has saved our clients the effort previously put into writing Excel macros. Power BI updates the data automatically so if a file contains new or updated data it will not have to be reloaded.
3. Handle time-based metrics with ease
Time based metrics can be a nightmare to achieve in Excel. On the other hand, PowerBI supports advanced time intelligence functions which are helpful to easily analyze trends or compare sales and financial performance.
4. Benefit from Power BI advanced cloud-based features
Power BI has revolutionised how you can publish and share reports and dashboards. Previously our clients were emailing large files, uploading them to shared drives or SharePoint then advising their team about the update. Since moving to Power BI their underlying data gets refreshed automatically.
5. Generate more visually appealing, easy to read reports than with Excel
Power BI users can simply create custom and interactive dashboards from different data sources while Microsoft Excel is spreadsheet based. These live dashboards give users valuable insights on all the activities, visuals and underlying data sources with attractive teams and visually appealing layouts. You can customise and edit dashboards to completely suit user’s needs. We help clients create their own branded themes using their brand colours. Clients can use these to create graphs, charts and reports that are consistent with the organisations branding.
6. Power BI delivers actionable information
Power BI brings advanced analytics to your daily business decision making process. As well as collecting and processing all the data you need, Power BI will analyse and extract actionable insights for you. Its analytical capabilities include predictive analytics and data visualization and real-time intelligence.
7. Power BI more suited to modern work than Excel
Unlike Excel, Power BI is more mobile friendly. It offers several apps for with iOS, Android and Windows. All the reports and dashboards are available on mobile apps, whether on -premises or in the cloud. This makes collaboration between teams in different locations and in real-time much easier.
8. Power BI offers better data security than excel
While Excel allows you to restrict access to a file, work sheet or workbook as well as locking files and giving read only access that is the extent of the Data Security it offers. Excel does not have the robust security controls offered by Power BI. PowerBI provides RLS -Row Level Security, feature which can be used to restrict data access based on M365 login credentials. It also allows you to define roles and rules as an additional layer of security for data protection. This means you can limit users and how they can see and access important data. This ensures maximum data privacy possible.
Do you want to give your organisation a competitive edge? Are you interested in finding out more about how Power BI, the data analysis tool that can deliver real-time business intelligence for you and your team? Contact ProCloud to discuss how we can help
