Is Analyze in Excel add in even necessary?

[cebyweiman]

Hello, 

We are building out our cubes in power bi desktop and then publishing to the service. People are excited to use the OLAP cube functionality in Excel but one question our IT team has is: do you even need to have "Analyze in Excel" installed locally on your machine? Reason they are asking is - we have observed that the data appears to refresh on a couple of machines where "Analyze in Excel" wasn't installed. 

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

Some version of the SQL_AS_OLEDB driver has to be installed on the PC.  Maybe your users have done that already for some other apps.  Are you on an older Office version or on O365?

[cebyweiman]

Thank you lbendlin. We're on O365 - what you say makes sense.