Direct Excel Pivot Table Access to Semantic Model In Another Tenant As Guest User

Thanks for the reply @GilbertQ,

Yes, I figured as much, you can see the same behavior if you navigate to PowerBI in the browser as User B (Guest User) and click on the externally shared semantic data model, then "Analyze in Excel", instead of taking you to a excel online window (as it will do with User A), it instead downloads a excel file with a OLAP connection (what you describe above). This indicates to me that the lack of direct Power BI connect support is a intentional decisions made by Microsoft.

We've actually been using the method (+with the assistance of a excel plugin) above for our users, however that requires the users to install a plugin (or undergo more extensive training). The benefit of the Power BI direct connect route is that it's easy for a user to navigate to their cube and download it without training, external information. or installing a plugin.

Further more our users would like to use Excel online, as they often use non-windows machines, and don't have a desktop version of excel easily accessible.

What would be optimal to see here is a more official source of documentation on this topic, you say it doesn't work because "it uses your logged in credentials" but in various other locations (Power BI, web browser) it does exactly the same thing (uses the same credentials) and yet I'm able to access the data model (because it shared to that user, that user has explicit access to it), browse it, and interact with it, normally, etc..

The limitation of this behavior is specific to excel, and I believe (please prove me wrong) the reason it doesn't work is becuase Microsoft only implemented a single button under the "Pivot Table" option in excel, tightly scoped to a single organization, and unlike with power BI desktop or the browser, never implemented the ability to connect to externally shared datasets.

Has Microsoft anywhere officially documented this restriction? Was that a intentional decision, or simply the first phase in a series of additional changes Microsoft plans to release? Do they, some time in the future, plan to add support for external datasets in excel (direct connect)? Is there a user voice forum where this has already been brough up (and voted upon) or am I the first to raise this publically?