From the course: Using Power BI with Excel

Pros and cons of Excel - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Using Power BI with Excel

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Pros and cons of Excel

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- [Instructor] You may use Excel in your day-to-day work life but haven't really thought too much about the formal definition of Excel. Excel is a spreadsheet tool which means it organizes your data into rows and columns so you can easily read and manipulate your data sources. There are both pros and cons to Excel. Now the biggest pro to Excel is that it's super easy to learn and use. I see Excel kind of as a gateway to deeper analysis. It gets you thinking about how you can connect to your organization's data and start to do some digging. Once you've found some interesting insights, then it's very easy to create charts and graphs to show the underlying trends. Next, we have a feature that is both a pro and a con. This feature is that Excel is very manually customizable. You can very easily drag data around, change the values in cells and make quick calculations. This is great if you're brand new to analytics as you can roll up your sleeves and quickly get to work. But there is a con to this feature as well. This con is that you're analysis is at very high risk of human error. If you accidentally delete a value, then your whole analysis could be broken. The biggest con of Excel is that it's not really set up to be automated. You can automate some Excel reports but the responsibility is on your shoulders to think through how to do this. Tools like Power BI are really designed for a systems approach and make automation so much easier. Excel is a great place to start your journey as an analyst but at some point, you'll want to move on to a tool like Power BI which will reduce your risk of manual error and help you automate more of your processes.

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