Right way to refresh data - import Excel

[misen08]

Hi,

Every months, I have to extract table of data from SAP and they come in Excel files.

I'm currently making a BI file to display KPI from the files.

What should I do to update the data? Do I only have the option to overwrite the old Excel files?

What if I want to append the old and the new one? Is it going to take into account all the queries made from Power Query and all measures if they have the same structure? IE: same heading names.

Note: I know Power BI can directly work with SAP, but I can't install anything on this computer.

Thank you!

[Stachu]

you can connect to a folder - PowerBI will read all the files there (you may want to filter some), then depending on how you set the logic, if the files will have the same structure then the aggregation should be really straight forward

[misen08]

Do I have to overwrite files in order to update? Or do I have to manually set again the source of  queries?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@misen08

If you have a folder as a source, Power BI picks up all the files in it. You can just save all the exports into the same folder without overwriting the old ones. 

So each day/month you can just save new files into the same folder and every time you refresh the query, the new files will be in your query.

If the extracts have the same structure, Power BI automatically appends them when you expand the excel file data in the query editor.

Br,

T

[misen08]

Thanks!