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PVO's avatar
PVO
Frequent Visitor
7 years ago
Solved

Prevent loading times irrelevant Excel tabs

Hi,

 

I basiclly have the same question as stated in the thread below. I'm looking for a solution to improve performance by preventing the loading times of irrelevant Excel tabs/sheets when adding them to a Power Query.

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Importing-excel-worksheet-among-multiple-worksheets/td-p/76281

 

With 'Get data' or 'New source' im adding mulitple differente Excel spreadsheets to my query. When adding, I'm just selecting a single tab. Every single addition of a new spreadsheet or refresh, all tabs are being imported. This makes my query slow and often crash.

 

Hoping to find a sollution for this inconvenience. Thanks a lot.

 

 

  • Hi PVO 

    As tested, when i connect to a XLSB file with Power BI, it would consume more time than XLSX file.

    I would suggest you to save the XLSB file as an XLSX file instead.

    the way Power Query connects to XLSB files and XLSX files is very different.

    • The XLSX file import uses the OpenXML SDK to get into the actual data
    • The XLSB file import (and XLS and some other non XML formats) uses the ACE OLEDB Driver (the one used to import Access data).

    The bottom line is the OpenXML import approach is far more efficient than the one that uses the ACE OLEDB driver.  While this may not be an issue with smaller XLSB files, it seems that it can be an issue for larger files.

     

    Best Regards
    Maggie

     

    Community Support Team _ Maggie Li
    If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

5 Replies

  • v-juanli-msft's avatar
    v-juanli-msft
    Community Support

    Hi PVO 

    If you want to import only one sheet from an excel file instead of all sheets, you could select only one sheet from the pop window.

     

    If you import many sheets, but you want only one sheet to refresh when clicking "refresh" button from Power BI Desktop,

    Uncheck the "include in the report refresh" for the queries which you don't want to refresh,

    Close &&apply

    Click on "refresh" from Home->Refresh, then this query will not update.

    Best Regards
    Maggie

     

    Community Support Team _ Maggie Li
    If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

    • PVO's avatar
      PVO
      Frequent Visitor

      Thanks a lot for your reply Maggie,

       

      I would like te import a single sheet from an excel file. Like you suggested, I'm only selecting a single sheet. But, during import and refresh it still displays loading times for all other sheets.

       

      Hopefully the below screenshots will show.

       

       

      • PVO's avatar
        PVO
        Frequent Visitor

        Anybody ideas or suggestions? 

        This issue makes importing Excel files unusable. Especially because i'm forced to use 32-bit PowerBI.