Power BI tables in Excel

For several years now, Power BI and Excel have been developing side by side with the idea that analysts do not save all their tables exclusively on a local computer, OneDrive or SharePoint repositories, but that they can also download them from Power BI reports that are published on the company’s tenant. If you use a Microsoft365 subscription that is connected to a company account, you can easily retrieve such tables.

Let’s start from the following scenario: we started Power BI Desktop and two tables were added and connected to the semantic model: Transactions and Locations. The first contains data on sales transactions, and the second a list of locations – cities where they occurred. Let’s select the Locations table. Let’s choose the primary key ID-L as the Key Column, and the LOCATION column as the Row label. Let’s save the document and publish it in one of the workspaces.

Now it is time to start Excel. If we choose Power Platform/Power BI as the data source, we will be able to retrieve the selected table from the semantic model on our company’s Power BI tenant. We can import it as a structured table (data table) or a pivot table.

Let’s select option to import a table.

By clicking the Insert button, one or more selected tables will appear in the Excel worksheet.

In this way, you can easily continue processing the data retrieved from the Power BI tenant. If you have imported a table that is marked as Featured, such as the Locations table, its data may appear as additional types in the Data ribbon. This functionality is available exclusively to Power BI Pro subscription users.