Forum Discussion
Dynamically display on-premise SQL data in Excel spreadsheet hosted in SharePoint
365Questions If I understand you correctly, you want to just use an excel file "as-is" and not load it in to Power BI.. You can do that, and the Excel file can be connected to a datasource. The only caveat is that the Excel file needs to be on OneDrive.
More detail here
Otherwise you have the option to pull that data in to Power BI via the desktop or Service. The Desktop will allow you to create a seperate model to bring in other data sources etc... Hope that answers your Q.
Thanks. Along the same lines, who needs to have an assigned Power BI License. Is it everyone who wants to dynamically refresh and view the updated data or is it the creators and editors of the Excel file?
Not sure about licensing, I think that under the old model, everyone needs a Power BI license to get to the Power BI site. However, that being said, the old way just stored the documents in SharePoint so as long as the people had access to the document in SharePoint, they should be able to view it.
Note all of the "the old way" phrases here, if you build anything using "the old way", there is no guarantee it is going to work moving forward. Now, I would anticipate that since the new way allows you to store Excel on OneDrive and OneDrive is essentially SharePoint that the new way will eventually allow you to use a SharePoint Online tenant just like how you use OneDrive today, but no guarantees.