Viewing Excel Workbook in the Service

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I am having a few issues with viewing Excel Workbooks in the Service.

Setup:

I connect an Excel Workbook stored in SharePoint, following this Guy In A Cube tutorial (from around 6:02). The Excel Workbook contains a Pivot Table, which is connected to a Power BI Dataset. I can succesfully establish a connection to it, and the workbook shows up in the list of content.

Issues:

• When I try to access the workbook, the behavior is quite erratic. Sometimes, the workbook loads as expected, but other times it doesn't load at all, yielding only a blank page. It then takes several page refreshes to get it to show up.
• Another issue is, sometimes a pop-up window will show up with the error message "The data could not be refreshed", even though the data is refreshed an up to date.

Has anyone experienced similar unreliable behavior? Do you know of any fixes?

Best regards,

Jacob

[v-henryk-mstf]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Can you connect to excel in a different way? Reference to the following document connection is helpful to you.

Publish to Power BI from Microsoft Excel - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

Power BI May 2021 Feature Summary | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

If the problem is still not resolved, please point it out. Looking forward to your reply.

Best Regards,
Henry

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

[Anonymous]

Thank you Henry,

I have tried publishing from Excel Desktop in the past, but that method reduces the ability to adjust the workbook after it is published, at least until you republish. With Excel Online, changes are effective immediately. Both ways have pros and cons, but for my use case having the flexibility of making quick changes is important.

I think the data refresh issue might be more of an Excel problem than Power BI. The error leads me to this support page: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/refresh-an-external-data-connection-in-excel-1524175f-777...

The occasional blank page might be fixable by clearing the cache, but that will be difficult to enforce in my organization...

Thank you for you help.

Best regards,

Jacob

[v-henryk-mstf]

Hi @Anonymous ,

In my test everything works fine and the display is stable. And no similar error message was reported.

Try clearing the cache and reconnecting after making sure the network environment is fine.

If the problem is still not resolved, please provide detailed error information and let me know immediately. Looking forward to your reply.

Best Regards,
Henry

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

[Anonymous]

Hi Henry,

Thank you for your reply.

The error I get is the following (in Danish unfortunately so I will translate)

The data could not be refreshed

        We could not update the data for one or more

        data connections in the workbook.

        The following connections were not refreshed:

       pbiazure .... (location of Power BI Dataset)

When I click "OK" it takes me to the workbook, and the data is in fact refreshed, contrary to the message.

The other issue where the workbook doesn't load does not show any errors, just a blank page.

Best,

Jacob