Power BI as ETL tool for Excel?

[Blacksmith354]

I have a large Excel workbook being used as a dashboard. I'm still using Excel because PBI is not as user friendly for copy/paste, Print to PDF, and also because several people do not have a BI Pro license.

With the size of the data model, and number of queries it's taking 30+ minutes to refresh daily and maxes out my PC resources while doing so.

What I'd like to know is if Power BI extracts and transforms the data, will it now load quicker into Excel? Or can I expect similarly poor results simply due to data model size?

[JamesLee94]

Power BI works well as an ETL tool for Excel since Power Query can handle most extraction, transformation, and loading steps directly. I found this blog post useful - it explains how to set up ETL workflows in Power BI efficiently, which can help when preparing data for Excel.

[mahoneypat]

FYI that Power BI Desktop is completely free (no pro license needed), and the query editor is nearly identical between Excel and Power BI.  I suspect that there is something wrong with your query that could be optimized.  If you share your M code from the Advanced Editor and some more info (# rows, etc.), someone from the Community can likely propose a fix.

Pat