My Current Favorite Power BI Feature
By: Megan Dibble
Tags: Power Bi, Data Analyst, Data Analytics, Business Intelligence, Excel

My Current Favorite Power BI Feature

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If you are a data analyst, then you have likely had a project where everyone wants to look at the same data in different ways. You can, of course, create new pages with new views, but at the end of the day someone may come back with a slightly different use case that requires another chart or graph. Will the report development ever end?

Introducing… the “Analyze in Excel” feature in Power BI. What makes this feature so great for end users and developers? Glad you asked.

Ad hoc pivot table creation

Using the data behind the Power BI report, end users can create their own pivot tables in Excel. This eliminates the need for requests like “can you add these two columns to the chart?” In addition to including all of the data columns, the file also includes all of the calculated measures, which puts the power of analytics at the fingertips of a business analyst or anyone who is less experienced in DAX code.

If a user of a dashboard needs data for a one-time report, then having them use the generated Excel file is especially handy because saves the developer from having to create a new page that will only be used once.

Real-time data

The Excel file created from this feature can be refreshed to get the latest data from the Power BI report. All it takes is a simple right click → Refresh. So, a business manager could create his or her ideal view of the data, and when the next data refresh cycle comes, he or she can refresh the report so it contains the latest and greatest data.

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Familiarity for Excel pros

Excel is probably the data analysis tool that business professionals feel most comfortable using— for small datasets at least. And some people may not be as quick to jump over to using Power BI, or they may have put a lot of time into creating great analysis in Excel files. Either way, demonstrating the Analyze in Excel feature can help with the adoption of your dashboard by people who may be resistant to learning new tools.

Additionally, users may want to incorporate their own data in with yours, and their data is likely in… you guessed it — Excel. This feature can allow for users to keep all of their reporting in one file or use formulas like VLOOKUP to combine their dataset with the data behind the Power BI dashboard.

You can make pivot charts as well

In the screenshot below, you can see that once you click on insert pivot chart, you can select “use an external data source” and when you choose the connection, the Power BI connection is already there for you to select.

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Tips & Tricks

Are you ready to try this feature out? Here are a few things I have learned as I played around:

If you want someone to be able to use the Analyze in Excel button in Power BI online, you need to check the second setting below, to allow them to build content with the data.

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If you are in the process of designing your pivot table in the generated Excel file, you can check “Defer Layout Update” in the bottom right corner (see screenshot below). If you do not, the file will run a query after each change you make to the table, and this could take a minute or so if you add a column/row with a ton of unique values.

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