Hi everyone,
We're in early stages of implementing power BI in our company.
We're trying to understand the available options for users to have access to more details about the data they’re seeing in the Dashboards/Reports available in the PowerBI service portal and we know about the following:
- Export Data (xlsx / csv) – exports the filtered recordset
- Analyze in Excel – opens an empty file with a readily available connection to the PowerBI Data Model but no report
- See Records (Right click on a visual’s part)
All these options provide us with some flexibility but it is still not enough. Currently, the users I’m working with, would constantly need export data to excel and re-build the same pivot tables from scratch every time they need to drill into the details.
I know that, by using the PowerBi publisher for excel, it is possible to create a connection from an excel file to the PowerBI data model, create some Pivot Tables/Charts etc. But, if possible, what we would like to have is a “centralized” solution, rather than have users jumping from PowerBI to excel in either local or sharepoint folders.
So my questions are (and please note I am using DirectQuery, with a SQL DB created for Datawarehousing purposes only):
1) Is it possible to upload to Power BI service, an excel file containing a connection to its datamodel and pivot tables and charts along with it?
2) If so, is it possible to refresh (manually and/or automatically) that excel file?
3) If not, are there any alternatives that could help achieve this "centralization and ease of use" goal?
Thank you very much
