The Power of Two: Power BI and R Shiny

Welcome back to this week's newsletter. This week, we are focusing on making a choice between Power BI or R Shiny with reference to a job description or career aspiration.

As a Business analyst, Solution developer, or Product manager, whatever your role is, you might have experienced a situation where you are tied between choosing a product for your solution and your customer’s preference. What was it like deciding at this point? For someone trying to find his/her way into the role of creating a dashboard or visualizing data, chances are that it might be a bit confusing or rather difficult. So let’s take a look at the situation from different angles.?

Comparing R Shiny, Power BI

Making a comparison between various tools for dashboarding of visualization of data has been a topic extensively explored by industry experts concerning R Shiny and Microsoft Power BI. Both have their pros and cons. You can read more on this topic through the references below.

Making the Right Choice

There are many tools or software available for dashboarding or visualizing data. Regarding R Shiny and Microsoft Power BI, defining or making the right choice among the various tools available for creating a dashboard or data visualization depends on which role you are taking at the particular instance. As a business owner or solution provider, the choice lies in your organizational competence, business case, customer preference and most importantly delivering value to the business.

As a Newbee, Which Path? Power BI or R Shiny?

Now as a newbie, looking at getting started creating dashboards or visualizing data this should not be an issue taking one step at a time. A lot has been said about the simplicity that comes with starting with Power BI due to its GUI, ease of use for beginners and non-technical users, as well as no-code assumptions as compared to R Shiny which is code-driven (R language). This is true but to get the best out of Power BI as a data analyst, developer, or designer you still need to get familiar with certain languages (codes) like DAX and Power Query M Formula Language.

R Shiny might be intimidating to start with as a beginner, but the learning curve is smooth especially when you look at the power you experience having access to the source code of your final product while this is not applicable in most cases with Power BI. Getting to know the R programming language and some little hands-on web development tools is a good enough reason to get the control you need on your app.

Conclusion

As the saying goes, Just start! Take the bold step to start with either Power BI or R Shiny, it’s a journey worth trying. I look forward to taking you through an exciting journey learning these two popular Excel alternatives, Power BI and R Shiny, one little step at a time. Also, there is a large online community of professionals available to help for both platforms, so we are not alone. Wishing you all the best and do remember to subscribe to this newsletter to keep updated. Thank you.

Reference

Dashboarding with Power BI vs Shiny

Shiny, Tableau, and PowerBI: Better Business Intelligence - RStudio

PowerBI vs. R Shiny: Two Popular Excel Alternatives Compared - Appsilon | Enterprise R Shiny Dashboards