Migrating from Excel to Power BI: A pre-migration checklist
If you have finally reached the limit of what MS Excel and other spreadsheet programs can do for you, Power BI is going to be your most obvious next choice to utilize your enterprise data meaningfully. Before you can migrate to Excel, you must ensure a few things are in place to make the transition smooth, and not something that you regret later.
Why do you need this review before moving?
The pre-migration steps for a move from Excel to Power BI are all about up-front planning to get your ready for each stage of migration. Most of the pre-migration steps are one-offs, but if an organization is large, it will be necessary to repeat the steps as Power BI is rolled out for each business unit or department.
These steps will also ensure that you are aware of the rewards that you can expect by migrating to Power BI, or the lack thereof – it might just make sense for someone to stay with Excel.
Pre-migration roadmap
- Perform a cost/benefit analysis and evaluation
Get clarity on your business case and BI strategy, how you’ll measure success, cost estimates, and ROI. - Identify stakeholders and establish executive support
Get executive sponsorship in place, aligning with stakeholders on business case and BI strategy, understanding motivations and concerns of business units, identifying, and including BI champions, and creating an internal communication plan - Generate an initial governance model
Set goals for adoption, Power BI, the all-up BI strategy, BI admin(s), achieving trusted data, data privacy, and compliance. - Conduct initial deployment planning
Plan Power BI tenant setting, workspace management, data and content distribution methods, dataset mode preferences, security and access, shared dataset reusability, data certification, reporting, change management, training plans, content author support, and user requirements management. - Establish the initial architecture
Set up Power BI tenant and Azure Active Directory, defining administrators, user licensing, tenant settings, workspace roles, and data gateway cluster configuration. - Define success criteria
Determine what migration success will look like, including the objectives behind the migration; expected cost, benefit, or ROI; and outline KPIs you’ll use to measure success. - Prepare a report inventory
Build an inventory of reports and data sources, including data from your Excel audit log. - Explore automation options
While isn’t possible to completely automate a Power BI conversion process automation can be used for some portions of the migration process, depending on your toolset.
