Difference Between Power BI and Excel

Power BI is a business analytics tool from Microsoft that helps build various dashboards and reports and can quickly deal with millions of rows of data. In contrast, Excel is also a tool from Microsoft with various built-in tools and functions that we can use for mathematical calculations, iterations, forecasting, and creating graphs and charts.

Key Differences

  • Data Size: One of the key differences is handling the capacity of data quantity. With Power BI, we can handle millions of rows together with fast speed, but with Excel, it is frustrating to handle large amounts of data.

  • Cloud-Based Features: Once the dashboard building completes in Power BI, we can publish the report to the end-users with Microsoft’s cloud-based services. But, when it comes to Excel, we need to share the large data with the dashboard via email or any online sharing tool.

  • Visualizations: In Power BI, we have plenty of visualizations to design the dashboard, but with excel, we have only limited visualizations.Custom Visualizations: Power BI allows us to import visualizations that are not there in the file by going to the marketplace, but Excel does not have that luxury.

Comparative Table

Conclusion

Although both are beautiful products of Microsoft, the modern era needs quick and easy insights from the data. Of course, Excel will not vanish anytime soon, but at least the dashboard building part for a large amount of data is already taken over by Power BI.

The future of Power BI looks promising and bright. So, you can consider investing your time and money in learning this because, in the modern world, companies are largely using data visualization tools. So, it is time to be a Power BI superstar at your office.

This article has been a guide to Power BI vs. Excel. Here, we discuss the top difference between Power BI and Excel, infographics, and a comparison table. You may also have a look at the following articles: –

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