4 ms·

It seems to be part of Excel since 2016, no? It appears to me that it's morphed over time and I'm not sure to what extent it remains a separate product. I've u

It seems to be part of Excel since 2016, no? It appears to me that it's morphed over time and I'm not sure to what extent it remains a separate product. I've used both DAX and M (Power Query) via recent versions of Excel. Obviously there are plenty of ways to interface with data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Pivot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Pivot says both Power Query and Power Pivot are part of Excel.

Rastonbury 5y ago
It's a separate product, analogous/competitor to Tableau. Just go to the product page
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I assume you're referring to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/ ? What I'm seeing there looks as though it is targeted at people who make the decision to buy products like this, but not to use them. I'm not seeing what couldn't be done with Excel 365 alone. There are screenshots with verbiage about how well it works with Excel. And they look like...Excel. I guess it supports R, and maybe makes it easier to seamlessly refresh a report. That's aggravating though, that it makes me suspect Excel might be purposely rough around the edges in order to not displace Power BI. As I've said a few times, I like M and wish they'd commit to it. I honestly suspect Microsoft is repackaging functionality that already existed for many years in their "ball of mud" software, with a shiny new wrapper and better defaults, but practically unusable, because people who license software are easily manipulated. Power Automate is the most awful example of this I've used so far. You say it's a competitor to Tableau, well, Tableau is a competitor to Qlikview, and I've used Qlikview and Excel enough to consider Excel better in every way that I care about. (My organization uses SharePoint, so that's how reports are usually distributed)

4 ms·

It seems to be part of Excel since 2016, no? It appears to me that it's morphed over time and I'm not sure to what extent it remains a separate product. I've u

by perl4ever 5y ago

Rastonbury 5y ago
It's a separate product, analogous/competitor to Tableau. Just go to the product page
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I assume you're referring to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/ ? What I'm seeing there looks as though it is targeted at people who make the decision to buy products like this, but not to use them. I'm not seeing what couldn't be done with Excel 365 alone. There are screenshots with verbiage about how well it works with Excel. And they look like...Excel. I guess it supports R, and maybe makes it easier to seamlessly refresh a report. That's aggravating though, that it makes me suspect Excel might be purposely rough around the edges in order to not displace Power BI. As I've said a few times, I like M and wish they'd commit to it. I honestly suspect Microsoft is repackaging functionality that already existed for many years in their "ball of mud" software, with a shiny new wrapper and better defaults, but practically unusable, because people who license software are easily manipulated. Power Automate is the most awful example of this I've used so far. You say it's a competitor to Tableau, well, Tableau is a competitor to Qlikview, and I've used Qlikview and Excel enough to consider Excel better in every way that I care about. (My organization uses SharePoint, so that's how reports are usually distributed)