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Is ms excel a business intelligence tool?

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Does excel qualify as a Business Intelligence tool? Excel is a spreadsheet tool but it offers features such as graphs, charts, pivot tables, and a programming language called Visual Basics for Application (VBA). What kind of tools are considered BI tools? The primitive answer is the tools that help in collecting data and analyzing it to help in informed decision making. According to this excel qualify as a BI tool.

But when you compare excel and other BI tools such as Microsoft Power BI it offers much more than excel. But professionals will argue that excel is always a go-to tool for analysis. If you compare a BI dashboard against the excel final reports you can easily gaze that the latter one is not that intuitive in nature which is a key feature that BI tools offer. Other than that excel reports can do the same work but in today's world, it looks obsolete in nature. BI dashboard is much more interactive in nature.

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As a user myself I believe that excel has a lot of features that BI tools offer but excel do not provide better insights which are so vital for BI analyst. If the data is too big in size then you can't rely on excel. Excel lacks in data integration, data traceability, security which can make it vulnerable to frauds. It is difficult to use excel for agile businesses. It is not at all meant for collaborative work.

In conclusion, excel offers some features of BI but it cannot be called an intelligence tool. Business Intelligence tools offer much more advanced features and available on almost every device. According to me, excel is a fantastic tool and in my practice, I have learned various analysis in excel such as RFM which can be done in BI tools too but I found it much easier in excel. 

This question is subjective in nature but considering the modern business world, you need tools that are equipped with the latest technology and help the business in making informed decisions and Excel won't be a reliable option in such scenarios.






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