No need to introduce Excel, as you can see. Here, it’s rather its future that interests us, and it’s on the move. Fast.

For the past thirty years in IT we’ve been learning concepts. Whether it’s development, with the MVC (Model-View-Controller), object-oriented languages or database management with the UML (Unified Modelling Language). Today, Power BI, for Business Intelligence, is asserting itself as the data analysis tool that extracts strategic information for not only top management but the employees in the field as well. We could indeed make the connection with the Microsoft Excel tool. But not for very long. Let's ask ourselves the question of the real novelty of the concept of Power BI. Twenty years earlier, the Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) tool was born. It already then enabled in-depth analyzes of the data that most often one displayed on Excel screens. This technology still exists. So, using an engine very similar to SSAS and similar languages, what does Power BI bring out that is really new?

Augmented intelligence

To sum it up in the blink of an eye: it's the same, but much better! Indeed, the possibilities are widely extended and it is thus possible in the same tool to:

• Retrieve data from different sources (Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP, list of public holidays on the web, weather forecasts, your company's data warehouses, etc.)

• Prepare this data (cleaning, filter, concatenation, simple calculations, etc.)

• Link these data to each other, as we did in UML! If we have a supplier table and a supplier transaction table, we obtain a list of associated transactions per each supplier.

• One can define the BI metrics (average payment time to suppliers, over the last three months, over the last six months, the annual number of invoices per supplier.

• Display this data in synthetic form in visually very pleasing screens.

And before that, how did we manage? Large companies disposed of deployable end-to-end solutions, for instance via SSAS, SQL, SSRS and a few others. As for small firms, not to mention individuals, no salvation was possible except for Excel, everything had to be done on this spreadsheet. Find, Concatenate, Sum.if, Replace, etc. On the condition, of course, of memorizing all the appropriate formulas. Even though Excel remains consistent for storing data or reporting to small teams, a page is turning.

The future, starting now

From now on, Power BI takes care of everything and makes aggregating, analyzing, refreshing, and visualizing data from multiple sources infinitely easier and more convenient. To summarize, it is understood that Microsoft Excel is becoming a satellite tool that we will need less and less for reporting. Starting tomorrow, it will be much more "Business Intelligence" than not, to know the Power BI formulas so as to use data in a more professional way, adapted to larger and more demanding teams.

In short, with Microsoft Power BI, the future of Excel is right here!°

By J.Lascaux, Fondateur de FiveForty°