For a week, I decided to leave the world of Tableau and venture into the world of Power BI. I had never used the platform before, but I had heard of it. Power BI is a one-stop shop for data cleaning and data visualization. It is a Microsoft-based platform, so if you have experience with Excel, you will find it easier to learn Power BI. Between Tableau and Power BI, there are many noticeable differences.
Simplicity
In Power BI, it is straightforward to create standard charts. Just click the measures you want in your chart, select the chart type you are building, and it will generate the chart. You can then customize the axis and other formatting settings at your leisure.
Tableau is not as simple but still user-friendly. It uses the pill system, where each pill represents a value, and you can place the pill on the x or y-axis based on the visualization you want to build. Building complex charts with this system takes time to master.
Flexibility
Tableau is much more flexible with its chart types. Although it might take some time to learn the pill system, once mastered, you have a lot of flexibility in creating charts. If you don't like how a chart is organized or how it looks (size, shape, etc.), it is very easy to adjust it to your liking.
In Power BI, customizability and flexibility are nearly non-existent. Once a chart is made, besides the format options, you will need to use DAX (the equivalent of calculated fields in Tableau) to customize your charts. Even something as simple as reordering field names requires an entire calculation.
Calculations
When it comes to making calculations in the two platforms, it is hard to judge which one is easier because, before this week, I had never used Power BI's calculation system, and it took some time to get used to. That being said, Power BI has much more complex calculation functions than Tableau. The distinction between columns and measures was tricky to understand, and the functions were less intuitive than Tableau.
I felt that when I learned Tableau's calculated fields, it was easy to understand. "If-then" statements were simple to the point where you could read them as a sentence and have them make sense. In Power BI, it wasn't that simple, as the syntax is different, and unless you knew the syntax beforehand, it would be hard to understand what you were doing.
All in all, I could see why people would want to use Power BI over Tableau. Being able to clean the data and visualize it in the same platform is convenient, and the simplicity of making charts is great. If I had more time to get better at understanding calculations in Power BI, it would be even better. With that being said, Tableau is the superior platform. Once you need to step outside the simplicity of building a basic chart, Tableau becomes much more flexible at customizing charts to view your data the way you want. To me, the latter is more important because even in Excel, you can create a simple bar chart. Plus, with the easier calculation system, I believe Tableau is the superior platform to use.