In today’s world the data is becoming a crucial part of our lives to understand and communicate data insights for making better decisions. Visualizations are an essential part and making it easy for us to study, as they allow organizations to convert complex datasets into simple ones.
Both Power BI and Excel are powerful tools and help users to visualize data, but each one has its own strengths and particular uses. In this blog, we will explore and study the types of visuals that exist in both Power BI and Excel, and how they are used. This blog is helpful for all aspirants who have just started learning data science and analytics.
Introduction to Data Visualizations
It is an art and science of representing data in graphical formats like pie-graph, bar charts, etc, which makes it easier to identify the trends, patterns of the data. A well-designed visualization can show so much important information more efficiently than raw data.
Both Microsoft Excel and Power BI provide a variety of visualization options, where they have different purposes, user needs, and are designed.
Visuals in Power BI
One of the integral parts of Power BI’s which makes it a standout feature and its ability to create highly interactive visualizations. We can choose from a variety of bar charts, chart types, line graphs, heat maps, pie charts, and geographical maps. These visualizations help us to catch the outliers, trends, and patterns from the data very quickly.
In Power BI, numerous visuals are provided where we can easily convert data into suitable visual forms to analyse easily.
Types of Visuals in Power BI
1. Bar and Column Charts
Bar and column charts are basic visualizations in Power BI. They are used for perfect comparison between the categories in the data.
Column charts are used for time-based comparisons, while bar charts are used when comparing multiple categories.
2. Line and Area Charts
Line charts are an excellent choice for visualizing trends over a period. When we just need to understand how a variable changes over time and how it affects other variables, such as tracking sales or product prices.
In the area chart, it fills the area below the line, which is useful when comparing the total variables of changes.
3. Pie and Donut Charts
Pie and donut charts are popular and are one of the most chosen by users when they want to show parts of a whole category. However, Power BI makes it easy to display the distribution of different categories.
4. Tree Maps
Tree maps offer a sequence of data and are very useful for showing segments in large datasets. For example, a tree map can show the sales or inflation/ deflation of a price in the different regions.
5. Scatter Plots
Scatter plots are best for visualizing as it is a relationship between two or more variables. For example, you could use a scatter plot to see how employee income relates to spending, savings, and earnings, helping us to analyze the data.
6. KPI
KPIs stands for Key Performance Indicators, which measure the performance over a period of time towards the given targets. In Power BI, KPI visuals show the key metrics (meaning a statistic that gives a measures) with indicators like arrows or color changes to signal whether a goal has been achieved or not.
7. Slicers
Slicers are interactive and very useful filters that allow users to robustly adjust the what kind of data should be displayed on a report.
For instance, we can add or create a slicer to filter data by places, time, prices or product categories. This allows users to explore or analyse the data more interactively.
Visuals in Excel
Microsoft Excel is one of the most popular and widely used tools for data analysis these days. It has many features to analyse, visualize, and interpret the data. This can work on all type of datasets – small or large. MS Excel has lots of potential to convert raw data into well structured data which provides better insights.
Types of Visuals in MS Excel
1. Pivot Table
Pivot Table is one of the most powerful features, mostly used to create reports and dashboards. Reports and dashboards are used to provide good visualisations in Excel. It provides a dynamic summary of large datasets so that we can extract key features from the insights with just a few clicks.
Creating a Pivot Table
- To make a pivot table, we need to select the data range and go to “Insert” then “Pivot Table.”
- In the Pivot Table, there is a field list; we need to drag and drop fields into rows, columns, values, and filter to maintain the data accordingly.
- Pivot table automatically calculate sums, averages, counts, and other measurements of the data.
- Grouping Data by options such as months, years, or numeric ranges.
- Filtering and Slicing Data: we can filter data by adding filters to rows or columns. We can also use slicers to filter data with the change of graphs.
2. Using Charts and Visualizations
Data visualization serves the same purpose in Excel. Excel provides a wide variety of charts and graphs that can make the analysis of data clear and simple.
Below are a few visuals available in Excel:
- Column and Bar Charts
- Line Charts
- Pie Charts
- Scatter Plots
Power BI v/s Excel: When to Use Each Tool
This is very confusing for us to choose which one between Power BI and Excel for data visualization, while it depends on several factors are following:
Complexity of Data
For complex data analysis and large datasets, we recommend Power BI. It is a better choice due to its scalability. It is able to handle such a large data while Excel is more suited for smaller datasets or quick and manual analysis.
Interactivity
If we need an interactive and more advanced dashboards with real-time data, Power BI have abilities to do than the Excel.
Ease of Use
Excel is a clear winner here as it is easier to use for those who are beginner and comfortable with spreadsheets. Power BI requires some learning and intelligence to fully use its tool.
Check our specialized Power BI master and Excel course for data analytics to gain required learning and intelligence.
Final Words on Visuals in Power BI and MS Excel
Both Power BI and Excel give us a platform where powerful data visualization capabilities can be explored. Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. Power BI is an all-rounder tool that is rapidly becoming very famous day by day. It is very useful in the data industry. All of its integral tools for business intelligence also provide an unmatched-supports for precise data analysis.
Power BI is offering various features from connecting to various data sources to making highly interactive reports. It is an overall platform for the users that is used across the industries like business intelligence, trend analysis, predictive analytics, and more.
Excel is an exceptionally powerful tool which is not only used to analysis the data but it has many more uses also. It is giving us a large scale of functions, tools, features to manipulate, analyze, and visualize the data. Summarizing data with functions, pivot tables, and conditioning formatting have boosted efficient data analysis.
At the end both have many common goals and kind of same responsibilities to do but Power BI is a kind of very advanced tool in the world as compare to MS Excel.
