Setting Privacy Settings in a Shared Excel File with Database Connection

Hi chris10 Syndicate_Admin 
This is a very common but poorly documented Power Query / Excel issue, and your assumptions are logical, unfortunately Power Query doesn’t behave the way most enterprise users expect.

(no Power BI licensing, Excel front-end, on-prem DB).

-> Upfront Answer

You cannot centrally enforce Power Query privacy levels via a shared Excel file.

• Privacy settings are not stored in the workbook in a reusable way.
• They are per-user, per-machine, and Power Query will always prompt a new user.
• This is by design, not misconfiguration.

Solution:
If your DB is trusted internally:
Excel setting (per user, once)
File → Options → Trust Center → Privacy →
☑ Ignore Privacy Levels and potentially improve performance

This:

• Removes prompts
• Stops inconsistent behavior
• Is acceptable in controlled enterprise networks

Enterprise deployment
You can enforce this via:

• Group Policy
• Office ADMX templates
• Registry push

This is how most large organizations solve this.
Tradeoff: Users could combine sources (but your model already assumes trust)

Power Query was designed assuming:

1. Personal data mashups
2. Not shared governed Excel artifacts
3. Power BI Semantic Models solve this, but licensing blocks you, which is unfortunately common.

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