Forum Discussion
Understanding what it can do
Thanks for the info waltheed. We have power bi as part of our companies office 365.
Do I need to use the Power pivot to the get the data ready for power bi?
Do you have a suggestion for how to add the historical portion of this into power bi? Since the budget is in excel and we might make a change to many different areas how could we preserve the history?
Thanks again for your insights.
I would advise you to start building your model in Power Pivot. Later on you can always import the model into Power BI Desktop and start making nice visualisations and publish stuff to the cloud. But first get the data right.
You can also start in Power BI Desktop rightaway, that has the same functionality for building the data model. There is no need to do it in Power Pivot first. But once you are in Power Bi desktop there is no way back to Power Pivot or an SSAS server.
The data model cannot keep the history. when it refreshes it just gets the new data from the source. If you anhance the source tables with columns to record history, you'll be fine. Another (not preferred) option is to create a new table in the source after every budget round, and givce it some meaningful name. Then you could use Power Query (or Get Data) to merge old versions and the new version together and load it into the data model. There are many roads that lead to Rome..
Biggest advice: keep it simple :-)