Hi,
I am trying to work out the best way to get data from a lot of different sources and excel sheets into Power BI.
We currently download the excel sheets ourselves from a couple of different systems. (We have no backend access to these systems, so we need to manually download it)
The way it's currently done is that we have a different folder for each different source of data, and have multiple excel sheets in these folders for each month. This ends up being roughly 10 different folders, each with roughly 12 excel sheets (one for each month). We are manually downloading the current month worth of data each day, and replacing the old file to get the up to date data. We then refresh Power BI Desktop to load this data.
Obviously this isn't the best solution... it works but it is taking longer and longer to refresh the report as we get more data. I have been looking into incremental refreshes and query folding, but these aren't supported when importing excel files. Would it be better to use a database of some kind as an additional step between the excel sheets and Power BI? Or will this still need just as much updating because of the few excel sheets which are deleted and replaced each day?
Thank you in advance.
