• Power Bi For Banking

I am not sure why you ask the question because you are not comparing apple to apple. The 2 tools are designed for different purposes: 1. VBA is a programming language. Excel and Power BI work well together. This allows you to use the two tools together to provide for many types of business workflow and BI practices. You can publish an Excel file to Power BI to share with others, analyse a Power BI dataset in Excel or import either an Excel workbook or Excel data. Beating VBA and 3 Dummies books is a great accomplishment 🙂 and Power Pivot and BI are just starting to gain traction. Here is something fun to look at, take a look at Google trends.

Power Bi For Banking

I am not sure why you ask the question because you are not comparing apple to apple. The 2 tools are designed for different purposes:

1. VBA is a programming language. It is the programming language designed for Excel users. It is designed as the way you think in Excel, you can easily automate your task by recording it in Record Macro tool and modify the code as you wish. Macro recording is very powerful and provide a low level entry for Excel user who has little coding training and experience to automate task without even understanding the code! With that said, VBA can make you feel very powerful at first but you should consider it as an entry programming language. It’s good for quick automation, but will not work in the long run. However, due to the ease of development and very little learning effort compared to other languages, many serious applications that suit business needs have been developed in VBA by people without technical background.
2. Tableau/PowerBI are visualization tools. Basically they provide more powerful chart drawing and updating capability than Excel. It because they recognize data structure and you will be able to draw chart by selecting column headers rather than selecting the cell ranges like in Excel. They also provide more types of charts with the most relevant visual design for each chart, so you don’t have to adjust chart design to make it look suitable for reporting.

If you ask which one should you learn first, or focus your limited time on learning, I’d say learn Tableau/PowerBI. You need those skills right away as a data analyst.

Forward looking, you might never need to use VBA, because it has become (almost) standard that a data analyst should be able to use Python (well at least in technology company). You could avoid it (not everyone loves coding) and that’s totally fine as long as you find a relevant company and position. But if you need to learn a programming language, choose Python.