Forum Discussion
There Is Now An Undefined Limit To The Number Of Rows That Can Be Imported From Excel
There is a web page https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-import-excel-workbooks that says in it that: "There is currently no limitation on the size or number of objects in the workbo...
That page is about importing an Excel file into Power BI Desktop - File|Import|Excel Workbook Contents.
As far as row count if you use an Excel file as a source in Get Data, I just loaded a 18MB 500,000 row Excel table from an Excel file on my OneDrive account into the Data Model of Power BI Desktop 64 bit in about 15 seconds.
Is it possible you are using a 32bit version? That has a 2GB memory limit, which is not the size of the file, but how the data is loaded after expanded into the data model. I've seen 32bit versions go wonky much sooner than I'd have expected with data sets I didn't think approached 2GB of space. I've quit even trying to use 32 bit version of PBI Desktop or Excel.