Excel is familiar and powerful. Power BI is impressive but has a learning curve. Which one should your business use for reporting and analytics in 2025?
What Excel Does Well
- Flexible for ad-hoc analysis and one-off calculations
- Familiar to almost every office professional
- No additional licence costs if you are already on Microsoft 365
- Great for smaller datasets and simple calculations
Where Excel Struggles
- Does not handle large datasets well; 50,000 rows becomes slow and painful
- Manual data refresh, someone has to update it every time
- Easy to introduce errors that are hard to spot
- Not built for sharing live, collaborative dashboards
What Power BI Does Well
- Connects directly to your data sources and refreshes automatically
- Professional, interactive visualisations with drill-down capability
- Handles millions of rows with ease
- Designed for sharing live dashboards across your organisation
Our Recommendation
For most UK SMEs: use Excel for ad-hoc work, but move to Power BI for any regular, shared reporting. The setup investment typically pays back within 2 to 3 months in saved reporting time alone.