Excel Dashboards vs Power BI Dashboards

Mynda Treacy

November 10, 2020

One of the most common questions I get is:

Should I be using Power BI to build dashboards instead of Excel?

If the person you ask this of has only used one tool or the other, then you're likely to get a biased answer.

I have taught thousands of people how to build dashboards using both Excel and Power BI, so you can be assured that I will give you a balanced view.

The video below takes you through the main differences and pros and cons of each, enabling you to make an educated decision on which tool will suit you best.

Excel Dashboards vs Power BI Video

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Excel Dashboards vs Power BI Comparison Table

The pros and cons of each tool are summarised in the comparison table below:

Excel Dashboards vs Power BI

 

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Download a PDF copy of this Excel vs Power BI Dashboards table.

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More Excel Dashboard Resources

Learn Excel Dashboards, Power Query and Power Pivot with Mynda.

Benefit from the same Power Query and Power Pivot tools in Excel to build interactive Dashboards, and when you're ready to move to Power BI, you'll have a head start.

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AUTHOR Mynda Treacy Co-Founder / Owner at My Online Training Hub

CIMA qualified Accountant with over 25 years experience in roles such as Global IT Financial Controller for investment banking firms Barclays Capital and NatWest Markets.

Mynda has been awarded Microsoft MVP status every year since 2014 for her expertise and contributions to educating people about Microsoft Excel.

Mynda teaches several courses here at MOTH including Excel Expert, Excel Dashboards, Power BI, Power Query and Power Pivot.

How to Build Power BI Dashboards

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4 thoughts on “Excel Dashboards vs Power BI Dashboards”

  1. From your comparison table above, I am not sure it is very correct to claim excel cant handle big data, because I’d repeatedly imported smaller datasets from workbooks or worksheets into power query to become a very large data.

    Reply

    • If you’re importing a lot of data into Excel via Power Query, then you should be loading it into the data model where Excel can handle millions of rows of data and can better compress it. If you load a lot of data into a Table in a worksheet, then you will have performance issues.

      Reply

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