Self-Service Business Intelligence from Microsoft “Power BI” for Excel

Microsoft “Power BI” in Excel has made powerful Business Intelligence more accessible to small and medium sized businesses by giving organisations most popular financial reporting tool much more functionality.

Prior to “Power BI” Excel could only access data with clumsy ODBC connectors or by creating an intermediate database. Typically technical and database experts are required to configure most BI tools to extract relevant data for report creators. The requirement for experts to configure BI tools has often made real BI prohibitively too expensive for small and medium sized companies and so the benefits of real BI has been just out of their reach.

Microsoft “Power BI” has developed an intuitive easy to use interface, called “Power Query”, which requires little technical ability to pull relevant ERP or CRM stored data into Excel from which many meaningful reports and graphs are now creatable by small to medium business users.

“Power BI” brings report creators one step closer to their data. There is a lot of hype in tech circles these days around data analytics and most of the time only larger organisations have access to the latest and greatest technology. Microsoft “Power BI” has now made data analytics more accessible to a much wider user group.

As a Financial Controller using “Power BI” for Excel enabled me to produce awesomely formatted best practice Managerial Accounts, KPI’s and Graphs. Knowing data available allowed me to produce ad-hoc reports in Excel within minutes for time critical decisions to be made. Also possible are automated tax and IFRS accounts. Automating all my reporting in Excel gave me an extra day every week which equates to a 25% productivity gain.

Having my reports in Excel means users anywhere in the world with most modern devices can access my reports without requiring any proprietary software or permanent network connections. Users can also perform their own what-if scenarios on those spreadsheets. For those paranoid about confidential reports getting into the wrong hands Excel can be protected so that only specified recipients can read them for a limited period of time if required.

This relatively new and powerful functionality in Excel means smaller budgets don’t leave organisations left behind in the fast paced world of technological advancements.

Note: You will however need Microsoft Office 365 Pro-Plus, enable developer and add-in modes, and download and install Microsoft Power Query for Excel to be able to use the full functionality of Excel. If your dataset is large it is also recommended using a powerful PC with a lot of RAM. I also recommend building your query first on a test data base rather than alive one.