Comparing Power BI Desktop and Excel

Many organizations rely on Excel for data analysis and reporting and have developed line-of-business applications that use Excel output features and APIs to create business intelligence (BI) reports. Power BI Desktop is a free stand-alone report design tool that Microsoft recommends customers use for BI reporting, rather than Excel. The products have similar foundations and are compatible in many respects, but they are designed for different purposes. Microsoft is investing heavily in the Power BI product family, and the desktop application is receiving features more frequently than Excel, which could impact the future of Excel as a reporting tool.

Desktop Compared to Excel

Power BI Desktop inherited mature data query, transformation, and visualization features from Excel in the form of Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map, and it added a sophisticated report design canvas that allows report designers to drag and drop data elements and report types to create interactive visualizations. (See the illustration “Power BI Desktop“.)