Data analytics and visualization is a must to Planning Engineers, and Managers. MS Excel was the winning hours with Pivot Tables and Power Pivot Tables. Now Power Bi came to take the lead from excel with amazing data analytics and visualization abilities. In this article i will talk about what Power Bi can do and Excel cannot.

Data Sources:

Power Bi has many data sources than excel. But for Planning Engineers this is not the effective point. Power Bi loads the data from the data sources very fast and with minimum load to your PC. I remember when i had an excel sheet which was connected to several data sources and it needs you to open all these sheets to update the data. Power Bi can update the data from different sources in faster and much easier way.

Interactive Reports:

Although, Microsoft Excel could produce interactive reports using slicers. But it is loading slowly and you need to refresh your tables if you changed anything in your tables. In the other hand, Power Bi use wide range of filters which can be used to sort / filter any data in the report in seconds.

Sharing Reports:

In Excel, you can share your reports by excel itself or PDF. However, in power Bi, you can share your reports via link. Yes, only a link will be enough to see all the report data in your browser without any additional software. Moreover, you can embed your reports in any online platform like website and/or ERP system.

Connecting tables:

Excel can connect different tables with relationships. But power Bi go beyond that, it is not only connecting tables, you can create a table from another using some filters. For example, if you have one table that contains the actual hours and actual materials cost. You can simply segregate this table into two tables one for hours and the other for materials. You do not need to update the new tables every time the main table is updated, this will happen automatically in power bi.

Visualization Market Place:

unlike the excel, power bi has very strong free visualization market place. For example, there one add on where you can add search box to your data. All the report data could be filtered based on your search criteria. You still can do the same in Excel, but it needs much more efforts than power bi. One more example about the amazing visualization tools is the maps. Let us say, you have different projects in different locations. You can set the location of each project and it will appear on the map. You will be able to filter the data by clinking on the map location, or the other way around. Project will be zoom to the map automatically whenever relevant data selected in the report.

How to get started with Power Bi:

If you are working as Planning Engineer, Planning Manager, Project Manager, Construction Manager, or any other rule that involved in reporting, you defiantly need to learn power bi. Maybe nowadays it is an option to learn or not. But very soon power Bi will be required like Excel today. Therefore, it is very good idea to start learning power bi now. We have developed a professional course which will help you to completely understand power bi. Furthermore, our course will tell you how to convert any Oracle Primavera Schedule into power bi reports. We have developed several tools to make this process very easy.

Check our course: Reporting using Power Bi and Primavera P6

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