Power BI has the ability to create Tables and Reports in minutes, which can then be shared via the cloud.  

Excel has become the main tool for manipulating and analyzing data, and developing reports in business today, and with the release of Excel 2013, Microsoft introduced even more powerful business intelligence tools.

To understand how the Excel Business Intelligence tools work together in Excel 2013, you need to understand the function of each tool and how it fits into the “traditional” Excel model.

This is the first video in a five-part series showing you how powerful the Excel "Power" tools are and how learning to use them can vastly improve your productivity, while at the same time giving you insight into your business far beyond anything you ever imagined.

Dates is one of the most common data types worked with in Excel.  It’s probably also the most frustrating to work with!

Instead of a month, day, or year, Excel uses numbers to represent the date.  It’s complicated further by the fact that dates are also days, like Monday or Wednesday but Excel doesn’t store that information in the cells.

In order to understand how dates work, you need to understand how Excel stores the information.  It doesn’t use day, month and year but rather each date is assigned a serial number.
This serial number is created by using the total number of days from a specific date since the beginning of the year 1900.  In other words, 1 January 1900 is assigned the number 1, 2 January 1900 is number 2 and so on.  Of course, as time goes on, the numbers have gotten bigger and bigger.

Today’s date is 11 August 2015, the serial number assigned to it is 42227.  So this means that there have been 42 227 days since 1 January 1900.

It seems confusing, but it makes it a lot easier to add, subtract, and count days. A week from today would be 18 August 2015, in order to work out the serial number you would need to add 7 to 42227 which will give you 42234.
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The best part of this, though, is that you don't have to worry about working it out, Excel does all the work for you.  All you need to do is make sure your dates are correctly formatted so that Excel can work with them as numbers, then you can do calculations and ask the questions you want to ask.

It is important to note that any date before 1 January 1900 is not recognized as a date in Excel. Excel does not work with “negative” date serial numbers on the number line.

To find out how to easily format your data, so that Excel recognises it as a date and not just text, watch our tutorial.

​A common problem in Excel is the ability to calculate the age of a person.

In this tutorial we show you step by step how to calculate a person's age using the current date.

The business world has changed fundamentally over the past few years.The speed of change means that mangers need to be able to make decisions quicker, but at the same time need to be able to process far more data to be able to make an informed decision.

Business today has no lack of data – transactional systems record every part of the business process. The key challenge for managers is how to turn the vast quantities of data into useful insight and information.
In recent years new technologies has allowed vast quantities of data to be processed, analysed and increasingly visualised. The new technologies allow management to understand trends, identify outliers and to see new patterns in the data that could not be processed previously.

Excel as a Business Intelligence Tool
Excel has become the main tool for manipulating and analysing data, and developing reports in business today. With the release of Excel 2013, Microsoft introduced even more powerful business intelligence tools.
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To understand how the Excel Business Intelligence tools work together in Excel 2013, you need to understand the function of each tool and how it fits into the “traditional” Excel model:

How is this relevant to Business Users?
If you work with Excel, using Spreadsheets and Tables to build reports, you probably find yourself regularly copying and pasting data between worksheets then clicking the same sequence of buttons to clean and shape the data.

You’ve probably found that complex formulas, dirty data and inevitable errors take up a lot of your time, making month end reports a nightmare that consumes large portions of time you don’t have.

Learning how to use all the Excel Business Intelligence Tools effectively will free you from the dull, repetitive tasks and give you time to focus on what’s important, analyzing your data and gaining insight into it.

This will enable you to make good decisions about your business.