Difference Between Power BI vs Excel
Microsoft Excel is an office 365 product from Microsoft. It was initially released in the year 1985 under Microsoft Corporation and a current version is Excel 2018. Excel is a type of spreadsheet application that captures data in the form of rows and columns. A recent version of Excel is enriched with a wide variety of features and applications. You can turn data into insights. Power BI is a business analytics tool from Microsoft. Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into interactive insights, coherent and visually immersive. Power BI easily connects to different data sources of any size.
Excel
Enabling and enriched with Intelligence, Excel understand your patterns, organize your data and helps in saving your time. Excel provides different templates that help you to create spreadsheets and perform calculations and modern formulas. Excel will help you to get a better picture of your data. There are wide varieties of charts, graphs, pictures which help you to present your data in a compelling way with sparklines, formatting, and tables to better understand your data.
Power BI
Power BI can connect to excel spreadsheet, cloud, relational databases, NoSQL databases, Data warehouses, flat files, Big Data tools and much more. Power BI is very robust, simple, fast and enterprise-grade, ready for extensive modeling, custom development, and real-time analytics. Power BI is in three forms, for Windows application, it is Power BI Desktop, as Software as a service (SaaS) it is Power BI service while third is Power BI apps for phones, tablets, and Android devices.
Head to Head Comparison between Power BI and Excel (Infographics)
Below are the top 19 differences between Power BI and Excel :
Key differences between Power BI and Excel
Let us discuss some of the significant difference between Power BI and Excel :
- Power BI is a Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Visualisation tool for creating custom and interactive dashboards from different data sources while Microsoft Excel is a software application from Microsoft that is used for data analytics, mathematical operations, data organization and many more features using a spreadsheet system.
- Power BI is very much faster in processing while comparing Microsoft Excel.
- Power BI can smoothly handle a large amount of data while Microsoft Excel is limited to some extent of data.
- Power BI handle Big Data while Microsoft Excel is not capable of handling Big Data.
- Power BI can connect with different varieties of sources while Microsoft Excel can connect to limited sources.
- Power BI dashboards are more interactive and custom while Microsoft Excel dashboards are not much interactive.
- Power BI is easy to use and very much flexible while Microsoft Excel is not so handy to use.
- Power BI is mostly used for data visualizations and dashboard sharing to a large number of users while Microsoft Excel is mostly used for in-depth driver analysis.
- Power BI is a more powerful tool comparing Microsoft Excel.
- Power BI is more friendly with mobile devices because of iOS, Android and Windows apps while Microsoft excel is not mobile friendly.
Power BI and Excel Comparison Table
Below is the topmost comparison between Power BI and Excel.
| The basis Of Comparison Between Power BI vs Excel |
Excel |
Power BI |
| Duplicates Table | Excel tables can show duplicate table. | Power BI tables cannot show duplicate table. |
| Applications | Excel does have some of the newer charts now, they can’t connect to the data model. | Power BI is ideal for Dashboards, alerts, KPIs, and visualizations, including analyzing your data visually. |
| Tabular Style | Excel is better at handling tabular style reports. | Power BI is not so handy for tabular style reports. |
| Reports | Excel reports are normal and ordinary comparing Power BI. | Power BI offers Beautiful branded reports comparing Excel. |
| Cross Filtering | Excel does not advanced Cross filtering between charts. | Power BI allows advanced features in Cross filtering between charts. |
| Dashboard Refreshment | Excel does not allow dashboard refreshment. | You can refresh data in Power BI. |
| Analytics | Excel offers simple analytics compared Power BI. | Power BI offers High-level analytics. |
| Reports Availability | Reports available is limited to specific users. | Reports available to a broad range of readers with varying degrees of tech-savvy. |
| Tool | Excel is your traditional spreadsheet program with a very long history which leads to a vast array of features. | Power BI is an advanced version of the analytics tool with a large number of features to play with data. |
| Data Model | Excel is totally focused on structured and simple data models with a wide range of features. | Power BI is really focused on data ingest and building potentially complex data models easily. |
| Separate Table | In Excel, it is difficult to relate the separate table to one another. | In Power BI, you can easily relate separate tables to one another. |
| Dataset | Capable of handling a limited dataset. | Capable of handling larger dataset. |
| Flexible | Dataset and report are not so flexible. | Sharing data and report is very flexible. |
| Dashboard | A user has limited features to build up reports. | A user can build up a customized dashboard. |
| Processing Speed | Speed for processing with table, graph, and filtering is slow. | Faster Processing with table, graph, and filtering. |
| Requirements | Excel is mostly used for deep driver analysis. | Power BI is mostly used for Visualisations and dashboard sharing. |
| Language Dependency | MDX language for querying data model. | DAX language for querying data model. |
| Purpose | Excel is historical analytics tools for an analyst. | Powerquery is a very good idea to simplify cleaning and crunching of any source of data. |
| Popularity | Excel applications are a little bit difficult to use comparing Power BI. | Powerful tool and easy to use comparing excel. |
Conclusion
Power BI vs Excel both are Microsoft product. Excel is a very old product of Microsoft while Power BI was launched a couple of years before. I believe 95 % of user who worked on Windows has used excel at some point in time. Excel is a widely famous product. Power BI is completely an analytics and data visualization product from Microsoft. The large number of companies who all are working on the analytics side are using Power BI. Excel and Power BI are near to 80% identical between two tools in terms of development time. Power BI lets you migrate complete data model from an Excel report into Power BI desktop with a just click. Power BI and excel have their pros and cons for data visualization. Power BI pros are into online features and visualizations while Microsoft Excel is excelled into Data analysis, data exploration, and Pivot tables.
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