Over the past decade, business Intelligence and analytics capabilities have evolved tremendously and are transforming the way companies are able to store, analyze, and present data. One emerging trend is real-time dashboards to provide executives and decision makers a live view into the health and performance of their business. Enter Microsoft’s solution, Power BI.
Power BI an incredibly powerful collection of services, apps, and connectors and has seen a huge uptick in adoption over the past several years. Using Power BI is a no-brainer when you are working with large, structured datasets and want to provide powerful analytics and visualizations to your stakeholders. However, we often use Excel to create content that is not structured enough for Power BI to easily consume, such as financial models, making it difficult to rely on Power BI’s native functionality as the only way to present your work.
Power BI tries to solve this by allowing users to import Excel data to use as a data source and/or directly embed an Excel chart in a Power BI dashboard. You can also publish an Excel file to Power BI and use the data as a data source or pin a range to a dashboard. While these features can be useful, there are several limitations:
- To use Excel as a data source, your data needs to be structured in a tabular, normalized format. This limits the compatibility between Power BI and a lot of Excel modeling and analysis, such as forecasts where months or years are listed as column headers.
- There is no way to display Excel visuals directly on a Power BI report. Currently only dashboards are supported.
- It is time consuming to setup new reports and connections from Excel, specifically on projects that use multiple Excel files.
- Many business analysts are not trained on how to user Power BI, DAX queries, and other complicated/technical features.
- Power BI licenses are not included in Microsoft 365, resulting in limited access across an organization.