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Microsoft’s Power BI is powerful and easy to use, and with new features being added every week, it is fast becoming the future for business analysis.

Excel formulas and pivot tables may well be the most popular programming language in the world, and the addition of tools like Power Query, Power Pivot, Power Map, and Power View mean you can connect to, clean, remove duplicates and transform almost any data you have.

We have discussed the benefits of Power BI in detail here, and now we discuss why this advanced interactive software is the future of Excel:

Power BI enhances Excel functionality

• Analyse data
• Prepare visualisations
• Share reports

While you can use Excel to build your data models, the analysis tools aren’t an actual part of the Excel interface. This can lead to having various interfaces open in separate windows, and potentially connecting to data and cleaning it in Power Query, analysing it in Power Pivot, and visualising it in Power Map and Power View.

These extra disconnected steps lead to complex data which can require tools like SharePoint, Silverlight, Excel and HTML5 to be able to share with others.

It’s an official Microsoft product

Excel has been a business intelligence service for a long time, but in order for business analysts to get the most out of their data, they are turning to tools like Tableau. So instead of cramming those options into Excel or trying to bolt them on, Microsoft is now supporting a broader set of analysis tools.

While Excel offers powerful ad-hoc analysis, ideal for analysing any kind of data, Power BI Desktop is interactive, allowing you to slice and dice your data and prepare visualisations for reports.

Features are regularly added

Power BI grew out of a SharePoint feature, and when it came out of preview in July 2015, it was already in use by over 500,000 users at 45,000 companies in 185 countries. Since then the pace of innovation has been moving quickly. Such as the option for importing Power Query queries, Power Pivot models, and Power View worksheets, and there will also be more import and export options to Excel coming soon.

Combines with multiple cloud services

To bring data into the Power BI service, you can use cloud services and you also have a limited amount of online storage, the subscription service also allows you to import locally held data. This is what makes Power BI so appealing, its ability to pull data from different cloud services, such as MailChimp, Zendesk, Salesforce, QuickBooks, Twilio, GitHub, Uservoice and even Google Analytics.

With Power BI Desktop you can go beyond the built-in visualisations, and make custom visualisations that won’t cost the earth.

Benefit from expert training

At Burningsuit we have years of experience in providing expert, well-rated training courses in both Power BI and Excel. We are adept at providing the information and skills you need to make the most of this software and your data and offer courses across London and the UK.

To book a training course, please call us on 0800 0199 746 and view our public course timetable here. Private courses also available.