Forum Discussion
Direct Query for Excel Data
I know that various data sources support a Direct Query (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-directquery-data-sources) but is it possible to connect an Excel spreadsheet held on a Shareport site in the same way?
I want a user to update the Excel spreadsheet so that another user can simply refresh a web-based Power BI report and pull that data through, rather than having to refresh the Power BI report in the desktop version and then publish it again.
Many thanks.
11 Replies
This is very recently now supported, in terms of the semantic model and data refresh from Sharepoint
Get data from Excel workbook files - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
If you mean Sharepoint, this link might help you out. Even though it's explaining how to do it in One Drive for Business, the proccess is the same in SharePoint.
I had the same problem and this helped me a lot. I didn't test the update functionality yet, but I guess it works.
Thanks guivecchi for a quick response.
Interesting link. The web based Data Source did pull data from the Excel file on Sharepoint into Power BI desktop.
Sadly, when I published the report to the web version of Power BI and then made changes to the Excel file, it still acts like the connector is an import query i.e. the report did not refresh.
I tested it here. Try refreshing the data source by clicking in those three little dots by the name of the data source.
After that go to the report section and click update above the report. This second part is important for it to update.
I guess this is made automatically over time but to test it instantly, those steps have to be followed.
