What do you consider best practise for organising files when working with Power Query/Power Bi ?

[DBricklin1979]

Hi,

How do you organise your files when working with Excel/Power Query/Power Bi to create reports? What do you consider best practise?

Background

I am a beginner at Power Query and have yet to learn Power Bi (I only use Excel, but I understand that Power Bi is better to use when creating reports). I work in a small start-up company (only tree people so far) and we are all subscribed to Microsoft 365 Business Standard. All the files we work on are being saved on MS SharePoint. My problem is that I am trying to figure out a best practise to manage/organise the input files and the final reports we create with the help of Power Query/Power Bi. The goal is to have a effective, intuetive and hard to break workflow/file-saving-structue that will be managable even as the our organisation grows. 

Some of the more specific questions I have.

Is it best to put the “building blocks” (csv-files and so on) in a “input” folder and then save the created reports in a “output” folder? Or how do you do it? Do you save the input files together with the created report? Some input files/building blocks I only use once and some I reuse all the time to for reoccurring/updating Excel reports. What should I avoid doing (worst practise)? Any other considerations that I should be aware of?

Thanks in advance for any advice given!

[lbendlin]

Power BI is still really bad at developer collaboration and code re-use.  Learn about using Github, and create a process where you can save your work versions  (either in GitHub or in your existing Sharepoint with file versioning enabled).

You will likely have many more data sources beyond your current CSV files.  There is no real requirement to keep Power BI files and source data files separate - do whatever you think is best for your team.