Excel vs. Power BI - What is the BEST Skill to LEARN?

okay let's settle this excel or power bi which one should you learn my name is chandu and i have been teaching both excel and power bi for about 12 years now so when it comes to figuring out which one to learn nothing beats the good old pro versus con list so i made something for you let's go through this so that i can explain to you which software is the best one to learn for your situation let's begin with excel simply because that's what i grew up with so to start off i feel like excel is one of the easiest data analysis platforms to learn it is very easy to get started and it is one of those programming things that is non-intimidating did i just call excel a programming thing or a programming language well yes while many people not think about excel as a programming platform it does have all the aspects of a programming language you can code things you can automate things and you can kind of build systems using excel so excel is very easy to learn that's one of the biggest pros for it the next one for excel is it's kind of available everywhere you walk into any office any mid-sized small or even large corporation anywhere in the world chances are you will find some form of excel it could be excel it could be one of the open source systems it could be google spreadsheets whatever may be the case excel as a generic spreadsheet software is literally everywhere at the last count there are more than 300 million active excel users out in the world so you could imagine why excel is so popular it is everywhere and that is a biggest pro for excel and then the next advantage of learning excel is it has more real-world applications than power bi or any other platform for that matter we can use excel to build accounting systems operations and optimization systems you know marketing related systems even apps and you know any sort of thing that you could think of you could use excel for that i myself have used excel for pretty much every aspect of my personal life as well as my professional life and then the last advantage of excel is it is very easy to get help within excel because excel is such a widely available platform and it has been around for more than 25 years there is quite a bit of online help tutorials videos books courses materials available everywhere and then the other thing that works with a software that is a bit older is that many people that you know might already know the answers to the problems that you have so let's say you got an excel problem you can walk around the office find a colleague who has been working there for a couple more years ask them chances are they at least know what to do in that situation or con can point you in the direction of the help that you need so those are the pros for excel now before we get into the cons for excel let's go into the pro section for power bi now power bi the biggest pro is it is free to download the free power bi desktop software is really simple just download it get started with the built-in demo data sets or you know use one of your data sets to get started with it so the second advantage of power bi is it is modern and a fancy software using power bi you are able to create reports or graphs or data analysis that feels a bit modern and 21st century whereas even though we could do the same things in excel it might take a while or it requires a bit more skill to make them look polished whereas right out of the box you get things that are good looking fancy interactive and dynamic and all sorts of good things in power bi the third advantage of power bi is it is considered to be in demand okay i put that in air quotes because what is in demand skill is kind of like it changes from time to time back when i finished my computer science engineering in 2003 the skills that were in demand are java and c-sharp well nowadays not so much again no no negative connotations here it's just that the technology space is constantly evolving so what is in demand today could change tomorrow right so in demand skills today in the data space are power bi data science algorithmic stuff and python and programming stuff but fast forward five six years these skills could be completely different so learning power bi the advantage right now is it is an in-demand skill and the fourth advantage is power bi works with large real life data sets and situations and this is kind of like a disadvantage for excel simply because excel is not built to work with very very large data sets whereas power bi is kind of really built so that you can use it for business intelligence applications and really large data sets there are companies out there that are using power bi on terabytes of data and billions of rows of information to figure out what is going on and get help with their data analysis so those are the advantages now as you can see each application has its own strengths now let's talk a little bit about the weaknesses by no means these lists are comprehensive i'm just giving you my perspective as both a learner and a trainer of these two software you know what is it that really kind of ticks for them and what is it that is some what requires a little bit more tuning okay change of location for our cons list when it comes to excel the biggest con in my opinion is excel is considered to be a non-skill what i mean by this is many people think of excel as just a simple spreadsheet software so they don't consider excel skills to be important or useful in the long run whereas you know the same people would say oh learning power bi or python or programming languages or anything else is a valuable skill but that's not true let me tell you a simple story back in 2010 i left my full-time job as a business analyst to focus on excel and run my website many people my colleagues friends and relatives all told me that it's not a very good decision and most of them just said excel is a simple software why are you taking such a big risk but that's not true excel is a very powerful software and i have been able to successfully use it and help people learn and use it better in their careers all this while so i think that mindset and that feeling that excel is not powerful kind of works against you when you are trying to learn the software the second limitation for excel or the second con for xle is it has data processing limits so excel spreadsheets cannot physically hold more than one million rows of data so many times in the real-world situations you might be dealing with data sets that are fairly large or have many many columns or whatever may be the case and then when you try to work with that in the excel you will hit the road block of 1 million rows of course there are tools and techniques within excel using which you can overcome the 1 million row limit and i have done some videos on that on my channel check the description for for those videos and the third problem or third con when it comes to learning and using xle is there are now multiple versions of excel out there so the three main versions of excel that are predominantly used in the real world are excel 2016 excel 365 and excel 2019 or maybe 2013. so these are the three main versions but there are other versions too excel 2010 is there excel 2003 2007 and even some older versions of excel people are probably still using somewhere else so all of these different versions means even if you learn excel let's say excel 365 from a course or a youtube video and you start working chances are that organization might be using a whole different version of excel and then that can create a lot of inconsistency and incompatibility on what you learned and how you apply it to your version of excel so those are some of the cons for excel let's go to the power bi side the biggest con for power bi especially from a learner or even an organization which is trying to implement is uh it is considerably more expensive than excel this is simply because even though the desktop software is free to download anything you create in the desktop software if you want to publish and share it with other people in the organization you must get the power bi premium or pro licenses and these are very expensive and the costs can quickly build up if you are trying to use it across a team apart from the licensing many times to use power bi you also need a supporting system like a data warehouse or a cloud database or something else and those costs can also quickly build up so that's why i feel like power bi is a more expensive thing uh for for normal day-to-day data analysis stuff the second problem with power bi is it has very limited uses it is a very good application for doing data analysis reporting and business intelligence stuff but it cannot be used very well for doing many other real life things like building models or building systems or applications or running simulations or you know tracking things none of those things can be done with power ba so then you will have to fall back to excel for that so even if you learn power bi chances are you will from time to time use excel for your work and then the third one is power bi has many competing apps so if you are learning power bi and you go to an organization chances are you might also find that they're using one of the other company competing apps like tableau or sas or click or something else so then your knowledge of power bi is not going to transform or transport into those worlds you must learn those software as well so if you want to be a business intelligence specialist then the bottom line is learning power bi alone is not sufficient you may have to learn those competing apps so those are some pros and cons of power bi versus excel now what is my suggestion location change the recommendation that i have for you is broken into two segments if you are a student then i have one recommendation for you and if you are a professional then i have another recommendation for you let's start with students so if you are a student and you are still in college or finishing your studies or between college and the job and you're still learning then i recommend that you learn power bi this is simply because if you learn excel in college you will not understand where that would fit in in the space of overall things that you are learning whereas power bi is more immediately kind of it clicks from a learner perspective in my opinion just to give you an example back in my college days we have excel as a course as part of my mba and i never really appreciated excel i i thought you know what was the point of this thing like why would anybody use this software when there are more powerful and versatile things out there this is my mindset in college and then when i finished my mba and then i got into my job what is the first thing that i'm expected to use excel and powerpoint of course and these are the two things that i kind of ignored all the way through my mba days thinking you know there's some higher level stuff every day i'm just using excel and powerpoint and pretty soon i just had to sit down and learn these things because if i if i do job in excel then it kind of shows through in my in my reports and outputs so i had to quickly learn how to use excel and then understand but in college time i couldn't really comprehend where excel would fit in so and i feel like you know that's the case for most of us it's a good idea to wait learning excel until you get into a job and then understand excel in that space but if you are a professional let's say you're an accountant you are a lawyer you are a project professional you are an i.t professional whatever may be the case and you're just trying to learn one of these two things then i recommend that you start learning excel if possible as the first step this is because in many many professions excel is predominantly used all the way through the week and of course if unless you are a power bi person then you will be using power bi more specifically but if you are a generic professional chances are you would be using excel to do your job well so learn excel and improve your career prospects and you know everything will look good for you now if you want to learn a little bit more about how excel and power bi compare like a final report within excel and power bi how do they compare uh here is a video that i did a while ago check that one out but if you want to learn a little bit more about excel like how to do data analysis with excel or how to do something else here is one video for you as well thank you so much for watching i'll catch you some other time somewhere else bye [Music]

Channel: Chandoo

Views: 112,968

Keywords: chandoo, chandoo.org, Excel, spreadsheets, excel vs power bi, powerbi vs excel, is excel relevant for data analysts, should I learn Excel or power bi?, power bi, microsoft excel, power bi excel, powerbi vs excel comparison, difference between power bi and excel, power bi vs excel: when you should use each tool, which tool is best power bi or excel, power bi or excel

Id: nOWzpJ4gUKo

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2022