Saving Budget History - Data Flow or Excel File?

[campelliann]

Hi there, 

At my company we work a lot with excel files. I have to report finantial information, and now we will have a budget for 2023 excel file. which will need separate ETL as the budget files always change a little bit in structure. 

Should I keep excel from 2022 budget and use perhaps incremental refresh - just to refresh the present year of 2023. Or would it be better, performance wise. to save the historic data as a dataflow (without any refreshes scheduled since the data is now static). 

Now the user will have access to info from 2022 and 2023, but I would like to know if its "better" excel incremental refresh or dataflow, as the level of burocracy needed to store on a SQL database would be huge 🙂 

[Idrissshatila]

Hello,

You can't perform incremental refresh when the data source is excel, since Incremental refresh is designed for data sources that support query folding and  Queries that rely solely on unstructured data sources or that don't have a compute engine, such as CSV or Excel files, don't have query folding capabilities. 

Refer: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/incremental-refresh-overview

Refer: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/query-folding-examples

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[campelliann]

Hi there, you have a video of Leonardo Karpinski on YT showing with excel. You need to have data split by several files, and the incremental refresh is on the files. You cannot do incremental refresh within an excel tble that is correct.