The 5 Things Every Excel User Needs to Understand About Power BI

The 5 Things Every Excel User Needs to Understand About Power BI

Blue Collar BI exists to help organizations and analysts start using Power BI more rapidly and more effectively. Often, when companies introduce Power BI, the first people to use it are business analysts; the assumption is that because analysts know Excel, Power BI will come naturally to them. While there is some degree of overlap between Excel and Power BI, there are a number of concepts intrinsic to Power BI that are alien to excel users. Without a firm grasp of these concepts, efficient and effective use of Power BI can delayed for months, penalizing firms significantly in terms of lost productivity and opportunity cost. Through a systematic introduction to Power BI, with a focus on helping Excel users transition to the new platform, Power BI will rapidly become an essential tool for analytics teams and decision makers.

Blue Collar BI is led by Jeff Lumpkin, an eighteen-year Microsoft employee who worked as a financial analyst and controller, and as a principal program manager on the Power BI Customer Advisory Team. In my own words:

I spent the first fourteen years of my Microsoft career working as a financial analyst and controller. As my career progressed and my Excel skills grew, I became increasing fascinated by analytics and how to use data more effectively. When I learned about Power Pivot in 2011, I recognized the power of bringing multiple datasets together in a single pivot table. At the time, there was very little documentation, no coursework and nothing on YouTube to help me. From my office in Munich, Germany, I set out to teach myself about power pivot and data modeling. The process was incredibly frustrating; there were so many things I didn’t understand.

Because I struggled so hard to learn Power Pivot, the lessons have been burned into my consciousness. I’ve also developed a passion for data, so much so that in 2015 I left Finance and joined the Power BI engineering team as a Principal Program Manager. Since then, I’ve done a lot; I spent 3 years traveling the world helping Microsoft’s customers to being using Power BI, joined a startup and built an internationally distributed team of Power BI engineers, and worked as a consultant on dozens of fascinating projects. Over that time, I’ve refined the ideas and methods used to teach Power BI effectively. I’ve also focused on the segment of users that I know best – excel analysts, who are the backbone of every company and the blue collar workers of the corporate world.

It's understandable that when an organization adopts Power BI, executives turn to their analysts for reports. After all, these analysts produce business intelligence in excel. They know the data, the existing reports and the key performance indicators used to run the business. Leaders assume, then, that their analysts will have little problem shifting their work from spreadsheets to Power BI. The problem with that assumption is that Power BI works very differently than excel. Unless a number of key concepts are introduced and understood, analysts will struggle to use Power BI effectively.

What are these concepts? Some of them are specific to the product. Others are concepts that would be familiar to SQL users. None of them are particularly complex once explained. However, without an explanation, beginning Power BI users can flail around for weeks without making much progress. This first post will list the concepts; subsequent posts will dive into detail and serve as a working introduction to Power BI.

The 5 Concepts

1. The Components of Power BI and How Power BI Fits into the Power Platform

2. Data Tables and How They are Used in Power BI

3. Data Models – The Real Power in Power BI

4. One-to-Many Relationships – Joining Tables

5. Calculated Columns versus Calculated Measures

Each one of these concepts is explained in further detail on Blue Collar BI’s website. Understanding these concepts and learning to apply them in the building of reports will provide a strong foundation for any new user working to build proficiency with Power BI.