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JooVaat's avatar
JooVaat
Regular Visitor
3 years ago

Dashboard from excel files - suggestions?

Hi,

 

I have built dashboard to analyze monthly product aftersales data (repair cases etc.).

I get data as excel files. Some of them are in different format so I need to do some PowerQuery tricks to unify the data first and then combine to one big table which is then used to power the dashboard in Power BI.

 

As time passes, there is more and more of these files and refresh is starting to take longer and longer.

Recently, I started to look into Incremental Refresh.

I tried few solutions but seems that because I'm combining data from different sources (local files on my PC), Incremental Refresh is not an option in my scenario (query folding not supported).

Do you have any suggestions what I should do? Create local SQL DB running on my PC to host the data and connect Power BI to it?

Need Help

1 Reply

  • lbendlin's avatar
    lbendlin
    Icon for Super User rankSuper User
    3 years ago

    Query folding is not required. As long as you have a usable Datetime field (for example something in the file name) you can consider incremental refresh.

     

    Using a database is not a bad idea, but doing this on your PC is.  See what the pricing is for an Azure database, for example. Or a datamart, or a new Fabric dataflow.