Power BI Transforms Excel Data into Interactive Dashboards

April 04, 2023 - by Bill Jelen

Problem: What is Power BI?

Strategy: Since Office 2010, Microsoft has been bolting various tools on to Excel. The Power Pivot data model lets you create relationships between tables and do new calculations. The Power Query tools let you clean the data. Power View offered interactive dashboards. But Power View was never really a part of Excel. It always felt like a foreign body invading Excel. Power BI is a “do-over”. They’ve built all of the goodness of Power Pivot and Power Query into a new product with better visualizations than Power View.

Power BI is free. You can import data from Excel, Access, Oracle, or dozens of other services. Provided you can find a key field connection between the data, you can mash up data from these different sources. You can add new calculations using the same DAX formula language introduced in Power Pivot. You can create better charts than those available in Excel. Finally, you can share the dashboard with your manager’s manager and that person can consume the data on an iPad, mobile phone or tablet.

This article is an excerpt from Power Excel With MrExcel

Title photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash