Forum Discussion
Disable Analyse in Excel
I can confirm that I now tested removing the ability to Export Data, as well as "Allow users to use Analyze in Excel with on-premise datasets" and waited 10 minutes.
When I went back in, all the options to Analyze in Excel were removed.
Below is what my settings were:
Hello All,
there is a workaround for this on Dataset Level Withot being Andmin or Tentant, and not for all the Organization.
If you hide all (or certain) tables for the report view (right click on table in Data or Relationship view in power BI desktop, then select Hide in Report View, then publish again. ), then Analyze in Excel will not export this tables.
Disadvantage: in Power BI desktop, in order to futher develop the model, you will need to unhide the tables again. :(
This is a information security issue as well!
Think about a huge dataset that potentially covers a lot of use cases and that is used for a report that only uses a small part of that big model. Sharing this single report will expose all data to be analyzed and loaded into Excel. That's not only an issue for external users but vor internals as well because it circumvents permissions a report creator might have in mind when explicitely not including a field into his/her report!
As a report creator we need to explicitly allow this feature to be availlable to the consumers for each report individually! To support the according idea, please vote for it here:
We seem to have found a workaround for this:
- In Power BI Desktop, click data on the left:
- In the bar on the right-hand side of the data screen, for each table, select hide in report view:
- Click report on the left to return to the report view:
- Optionally, in the bar on the right-hand side in report view, you can choose to view hidden tables (this will not affect the online report, only while working in PowerBI Desktop):
- Publish this version.
Now, users in our workspace can still export summarized Excel Data (as we want):
But they cannot view/export the underlying data - nor via the Excel download option shown above, nor via the "Analyse in Excel" link topright. The "Analyse in Excel" link is still there, but only opens an empty Excel file:
(EDIT: now I see that todo-claro already mentioned this same workaround already on the previous page. Thnx todo-claro :))
Still, I hope Microsoft will simply add a "turn Analyze in Excel on/off" button, while keeping the functionality to export summarized data to Excel.
Barendnu: Thanks for your reply! Yes, I know about hiding fields and it might help in certain scenarios.
However, that approach cripples the use of "Power BI Live Connect" as well!
We make extensive use of that feature and build big datasets that are used multiple times in reports. While you must be member of the workspace to access the dataset with live query, Analyze in Excel offers the same capabilities when the report is simply shared.
- In Power BI Desktop, click data on the left:
