Migrating your Excel skills to Power BI

Microsoft Excel is the number one most popular computer program in the world. While Excel is an amazing tool, the millions of users using it to analyze their data are thirsty for more. Fortunately, Power BI was designed with the Excel fanatic in mind. Many of the skills collected over time while designing Excel solutions still apply in Power BI. Concepts like modeling data, writing Excel formulas, and building PivotTables, all have comparable features in Power BI.

Excel was the first self-service business intelligence tool provided by Microsoft. Starting in Excel 2010, features known as Power Pivot and later Power Query were added to enable more advanced data analytics problem solving that traditional Excel could not handle. These two features would later become the core building blocks for what Power BI is today. So much so that even today, any Excel solution developed using Power Pivot and Power Query can be migrated into Power BI via a simple migration wizard.

Having an understanding of these additional Excel features can give someone an incredible head start when learning Power BI. If you are reading this book and feel confident in your Excel skills, pay close attention throughout this book to each tutorial and consider how you would have solved the various use cases in Excel. You will likely find that Power BI is an incredible time saver over how you would have previously solved these problems in Excel.