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 annoying 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.
| Item | Power BI | Excel |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Recent product, so you cannot see this with all Excel users. | Commonly known and available to most people. |
| Learning | Requires considerable knowledge of Power Query and Power Pivot DAX formulas and techniques to use it. | Universal language spoken in almost all the offices worldwide. Most users find it easy to learn. |
| Cost to Acquire | Free to download and use for personal use, but it takes $10 per month per user to share reports with others. | Free |
| Working Flexibility | Not flexible, especially if it just shifted from Excel to Power BI. You cannot do everything, everywhere. | Flexible to use and create summary reports in simple steps and formulas. |
| Visuals | Wide variety of visualizations. | Only a few built-in charts. |
| Chart Customization | Possibility work with only one chart. | Possibility to create another set of charts only using built-in charts. |
| Dashboard Interactivity | Power BI not only has slicers but also has a wide variety of other slicers. Cross filters, visual level filters, report level filters, and drillthrough filters. | Excel has slicers to make the dashboards interactive with the user. |
| Size of the Data | Can handle large amounts of data with the Power Pivot engine model. | Struggles to handle a large amount of data and often says “Not Responding” error with a large quantity of data. |
| Accessibility | Cannot be accessible everywhere unless you have licensed software. | Access from everywhere. |
| Formula Language | DAX language for its formulas and functions. | MDX language for its formulas and functions. |
| Data Security | Possibility to restrict the data view to individuals by setting rules. | When you share the dashboard with external stakeholders, you need to share it with data, which does not guarantee data security. |
| Data Source | Can get data from everywhere with Power Query. | Can get data from everywhere with Power Query. |
Power BI and Excel have many similarities in terms of functionalities and how the data is presented or how we make the connection with the other data sources. Excel is much easier to use than Power BI, but Power BI has a certain upper hand, like better visualization. We should also remember that Excel is very limited to sharing reports which Power BI overcomes.
You can read more about Power BI vs Excel – Differences here.
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