Power BI is a business analytics tool for creating interactive dashboards and reports from your data.

What it can do:

• Connect to hundreds of data sources (Excel, SQL, cloud apps, web APIs)
• Clean & transform data (same Power Query as Excel, but for larger datasets)
• Build interactive visuals – charts, maps, slicers, KPIs that filter together when you click
• Handle massive datasets – millions or billions of rows (Excel’s limit is ~1 million)
• Share dashboards online or in the Power BI mobile app, with auto-refresh scheduling
• Ask questions in plain English – e.g., “total sales by region last month” – and it generates a chart

	Excel	Power BI
Primary Use	Ad-hoc analysis, calculations, small data	Interactive dashboards, large data, sharing
Data Limit	~1 million rows	Billions of rows
Visuals	mostly static charts	Interactive, cross-filtering charts
Sharing	Cloud, Email files or PDFs	Publish to cloud dashboards
Refresh	maunual, oOffice Scrips or VBA	Scheduled auto-refresh
Learning curve	easier to start	Steeper, but logical for Excel users
Cost	Part of Microsoft 365	Free desktop; sharing costs ~US$10-20/user/month