My favourite Power BI announcement at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit was, without a incertitude, that Excel PivotTables connected to Ability BI datasets will very before long work in the browser and not just on the desktop. This is something I have wanted for a long time, manner before I joined Microsoft, so this is a feature I have a personal interest in. Notwithstanding I also recall it'due south an incredibly important step forrad for Ability BI in general and in this post I'll outline the reasons why.

Before nosotros acquit on please make certain you read this post on the Excel blog which has more details on all of the new Power BI/Excel integration features that are existence released. Quick summary: if you're reading this in late May 2021 you lot probably won't accept all of this functionality available in your tenant still but it is coming very soon.

And so why exactly am I excited?

It makes Excel a third option for building Power BI reports

Upwards to now, if yous wanted to build Ability BI reports and share them with other people online you had ii choices: regular Power BI reports and paginated reports. Now Excel gives you a tertiary choice: you tin upload Power BI-connected Excel workbooks to a Power BI workspace, brand them available via a Power BI app, and not merely will they be fully interactive but the data in them will besides update automatically when the data in your dataset updates.

PivotTables are the all-time way to explore Power BI information

Why do we demand Excel as an choice for building reports on data stored in Power BI? The first reason is data exploration. Excel PivotTables are a much amend way to explore your information than any other method in Power BI, in my stance. Why try to recreate an Excel PivotTable using a matrix visual in a regular Power BI study when you lot can requite your users the real affair?

Cube functions as well at present work in the browser – and they make it easy to design financial reports

The Excel cube functions (CubeMember, CubeValue etc) are, I remember, the best-kept feature in Excel. While PivotTables are great for exploring data they aren't always so great when you desire to build highly-formatted reports. The Excel cube functions make it easy to bind individual cells in a worksheet to individual values in your dataset and because they're just similar whatever other Excel function they allow you to use all of Excel's formatting and charting functionality. This then makes it possible to build certain types of report, such every bit fiscal reports, much more hands. If you want to acquire more near them bank check out this video from Peter Myers – it shows how to use them with Analysis Services but they work but the aforementioned when connected to a Power BI dataset.

Organisational information types make it piece of cake to access Ability BI data

While the Excel cube functions are very powerful they are also somewhat difficult to use and sometimes suffer from operation problems. The new organisational data types in Excel do something very similar and while they don't however have all the features yous need to build complex reports they are also a lot easier to understand for most concern users.

Excel formulas are easier than DAX for a many calculations

Everyone knows DAX can be difficult sometimes. Withal, once you've got the data you need from your dataset into Excel using a PivotTable, cube functions or organisational data types you lot tin then do your own calculations on that information using regular Excel formulas. This non merely allows business users to add their ain calculations easily but for BI professionals it could exist the instance that an Excel formula is easier to write and faster to execute than the equivalent DAX.

Excel tin visualise data in means that Power BI tin can't

Excel is a very mature data visualisation tool and it has some types of nautical chart and some formatting options that aren't (yet) bachelor in Ability BI's native visuals. One instance that springs to mind is that you can add fault bars to a bar nautical chart in Excel; another is sparklines, although they are coming to Power BI afterwards this year.

Power Pin reports will also work in the browser

Fifty-fifty if you don't have a Power BI pro licence, if you have a commercial version of Excel you'll have Power Pivot and the Excel Data Model. And estimate what, Power Pivot reports also now work in the browser!

Collaborate in real-time with your colleagues in Excel Online

With Excel reports continued to Power BI stored in OneDrive for Business or a SharePoint document library y'all get bully features for collaboration and co-authoring, so y'all and your colleagues can analyse data together even if y'all're not in the same room.

In that location's a lot of other cool stuff happening in Excel correct now

The Excel squad are on a hot streak at the moment: dynamic arrays, LAMBDAs, LET, the ancestry of Power Query on the Mac and lots more cool new stuff has been delivered recently. If you're only familiar with the Excel features y'all learned on a class xx years ago yous're missing out on some really powerful functionality for information analysis.

Everyone knows Excel!

Last of all, it goes without proverb that Excel is past far the most popular tool for working with information in the world. Everyone has it, anybody knows it and anybody wants to use information technology. Equally Power BI people we all know how difficult it is to persuade our users to carelessness their old Excel habits, so why not run into them halfway? Storing information in a Power BI dataset solves many of the problems of using Excel equally a reporting tool: no more than manual exports, sometime-of-date data or multiple versions of the truth. Using Excel to build reports on acme of a Power BI dataset may be much easier to acquire and take for many business users – at least at first – than learning how to build reports in Ability BI Desktop.