How to increase/boost excel report's performance when power BI dataset is connected

Hi fellow Power BI users,

We are using Power BI datasets for our business reporting. So far our business is really happy with the performance when they interactive (slice/dice) data with Power BI reports pointing to these datasets . They also have bunch of heavy excel pivots which they use day in day out and we would like them to be pointed to these datasets too. 

For now, we have asked business to connect to Power BI dataset through the plugin, The way they access is as follow : 

1. Open Excel

2, Navigate to Get Data option 

3. Select From Power Platform

4. From Power BI connector

We have observed, once the we connect to Power BI datasets and refresh the excel pivots- they are very slow ~ 6 mins time to refresh one complex pivot and the same pivot takes about 2 mins when connected to On prem SSAS cubes.

Note: Our Power BI dataset is around 16GB, has RLS enabled and we have opted for Large storage format setting and cache setting on cloud services side. 

So the questions are :

a. Is  there different way which is faster than this to connect local excel reports pointing to Power BI datasets ?

b. Are they any optimization techniques at excel end or Power BI cloud service end which we can play around to see if that increase our excel user performance? 

Appreciate the help, thanks in advance 🙂 

amitchandak Anonymous 

Thank you!