For many years, Microsoft Excel has been the go-to reporting tool for businesses. But since the release of , a “business intelligence” tool that offers powerful analytics and reporting features, it's a whole new ballgame!
Power BI was designed to help in systematically analyzing data and sharing insights. With faster experimentation with visualizations, statistical functions and calculations across broad datasets, and the ability to derive answers on the fly through the rapid recombination of fields, it is clear that Power BI delivers far greater insight than Excel.
Most importantly for users, how do they really compare? What does Power BI have that Excel doesn’t?
1. Access and Store a Vast Amount of Data - Power BI uses powerful compression algorithms to import and store the data, which allows you to view, analyze and visualize huge quantities of data that can’t be opened in Excel. Thanks to this impressive feature you don’t need to cut down in size large datasets to show more encompassing analysis anymore, even most detailed reports and summarizations can exist in one file and can be analyzed through drill-downs.
2. Personalized Dashboards - Power BI helps you to stay on top of all insights and makes it easy to draw comparisons, apply analytics, or chart and visualize reports. Users have the ability to customize the size and layout of various visuals and layout the dashboard in a way that is most insightful to their specific role. These newly made dashboards can also be shared with other users within the organization for further collaboration.
3. Spots Data Trends Quickly - Analyzing trends with Power BI is extremely easy. With built-in time intelligence features, it only takes seconds to view massive amounts of data. You can view data by various dimensions and attributes, including date-time dimensions.
4. Intuitive UX Features - No need for advanced UX skills, it’s so easy to make something appealing and neat with limited creativity in Power BI! Drag-and-drop functionality, easy resizing, and copying and pasting, pasting makes those who are familiar with the Microsoft Office suite feel right at home. Creating graphs and charts that are consistent with one another in terms of coloring has never been easier!
5. Incredible Cloud-based Features - Once you have finished constructing your Power BI analysis, you need a way to publish and disseminate your dashboards and reports. In Excel this would typically involve emailing a large file around, putting it in a shared drive or SharePoint portal, and letting people know it has been updated. Now with Power BI, this process has been completely revolutionized.
6. Row Level Security Features - With the Row Level Security (RLS) feature, you can control security levels and have the power to grant and withdraw access, even to specific rows of data on reports. This creates an extra security layer for all data and makes your work more efficient which saves time and money. Instead of creating and maintain multiple reports for every team member, you only invest time in building a single report, and then with the use of access control restrictions which data users can see.
Power BI is an easy tool to use that helps propel organizations into a data-driven culture. With powerful self-service abilities, no longer are business users dependent on IT for gathering, transforming and analyzing data.
Ready to learn more? Join Express Information Systems on Wednesday, May 13th for a as they demonstrate the new for Dynamics GP! The Power BI – Report Pack for Dynamics GP is a suite of 100+ pre-built, interactive Dashboard Reports that give you a 360-degree view of your data at the click of the mouse.
The future is bright and shiny for analytics and, Express is ready to lead you on this journey... !
By Express Information Systems, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Dynamics 365 Business Central and Sage Intacct Partner,
