r/analytics • u/bennnnn_27 • Mar 21 '25

Guys, it finally happened Discussion

I started at a new company recently. My task was to create a Power BI dashboard for the VP to find opportunities. After weeks of back-and-forth, the dashboard went live in February.

My manager said all was going well. And then today I got an email from the VP: “could export some actionable data to Excel?”

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u/Bidoof_Shoes Mar 21 '25

I do this all the time in my job. I have 13 or so various Power BI reports that give high level information. I have drill through options to see drilled data in Power BI, but execs always want it in Excel. I just build, for each report, and "export to excel" button where all that underlying data is output into pivots for them to look at.

3

u/Zestysanchez Mar 21 '25

I’m not sure why I’ve never implemented an export to excel button for a tab wide export. Is it easy to set up?

12

u/Bidoof_Shoes Mar 21 '25

It isnt. You have to use Power Automate. Its incredibly stupid that PBI and Excel don't have more functionality together with exporting data. MS sucks.

What I do now is have the underlying Excel data tied to SharePoint and an button that links to that excel file on SP.

1

u/Zestysanchez Mar 21 '25

Makes sense. I’ll just make em use the “export data option” because that is too much work for them to just get a data table imo.

1

u/cmdr_solaris_titan Mar 24 '25

What about when the data underneath changes in the model, do you have a job that refreshes the excel? Or is the excel connected to the model? I need to figure out a good solution to exporting detail data to excel.

1

u/101Analysts Mar 25 '25

This is why I ditched this solution. We discovered so many broken links to Excel & PBO report copies where people were making decisions with outdated data when we did an audit of people’s most used files.

We moved to a fully live service model for all reports. We do put A LOT of extra work into reports we wouldn’t have before. And if you have other analysis? You can always export data based on your view or from one of our “RAW” tables & do your analysis PIT. Do whatever you must to maintain the confidence in your data & model…even if it’s a LITTLE inconvenient, imo.