Do we need a BI tool or is a spreadsheet enough?
A spreadsheet is enough more often than the BI industry wants you to know: a well-built one, fed automatically, beats a dashboard nobody opens. Graduate to BI when many people need live answers at once, not when a demo dazzles a director.
The longer answer
In practice.
The honest test
Who reads it, how often, on what device, and does it need to be live? One
manager reviewing weekly numbers is a spreadsheet. Twenty people needing today's
position on their phones is a dashboard, and I build those too, with a
public example you can
inspect.
What actually matters either way
The feed, not the front end. Numbers pulled automatically from the source
with every figure traceable back to it. A gorgeous dashboard on manually pasted
data is a rumour with graphics.
The cheap upgrade path
Automate the feed into the spreadsheet you already trust, per
automating the weekly report.
Half the BI purchases I have reviewed were solving a copy-paste problem with a
licence fee.
Same rabbit hole