Navigating the journey from Excel to Fabric (and back again!)
For decades, the entire business world has been built on the flexibility and power of spreadsheets. From rocket science to credit derivatives, a mind that could imagine it could implement it with nothing more than Excel formulas and cell references. But over time this has resulted in siloed, manual processes in “Shadow IT” where some of the most valuable data and logic in an organisation is locked away in these files.
But it doesn’t need to be like that! The promise of Microsoft Fabric is to bring all your organisational data into a single place, in a single format where it can be extracted, shaped, enriched and secured once for use in any tool. So, from an organizational perspective, there are many benefits of such a unified data platform.
However, it’s not obvious how you would take an Excel-based process (or financial model) and bring it into a Power BI and Fabric environment. Perhaps it’s overkill to even consider such a move, and it’s potentially a significant business risk if those analysts used to working in Excel haven’t yet developed the different skillsets required for Fabric.