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

[093_saurabh]

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!

[v-tangjie-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @093_saurabh ,

You've connected to the Power BI dataset in one of two ways:

• If you connected using Analyze in Excel or the Power BI dataset experience in Excel, your Excel workbook contains an empty PivotTable and Fields list from the Power BI dataset.
• If you connected via export with live connection, your Excel workbook contains an Excel table.

Refer this : Design refreshable reports in Excel with Power BI data - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

In addition, please refer to the following documentations to optimize performance.

Optimising OData Refresh Performance in Power Query for Power BI and Excel - BI Insight

Power BI Performance Optimization: Make Reports Run Up to 10X Faster (zebrabi.com)

Best Regards,

Neeko Tang

If this post  helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution  to help the other members find it more quickly. 

[093_saurabh]

@v-tangjie-msft It looks like you have broken response. Will appreciate if you could send through full response.