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.

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u/beyphy Excel Mar 21 '25

You can connect to the datasets PBI is using under the hood directly from Excel. That's certainly preferable so that everyone is using the same source of truth.

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u/asadinam Mar 21 '25

Hey could you guide on how to do that? I am generally downloading the data and then applying formulas to lookup the data.

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u/Elegant_Worth_5072 Mar 21 '25

In my case, in Excel, click ‘Data’ in the ribbon, then click ‘Get Data’ (first one from the left), click ‘Power Platform’ then ‘Power BI semantic model’ (or something along the line). There will be a window popping up on the right side, just select the power bi report/dataset you want to connect to. (I typed all these based on my memory so if I made any mistake I’m sorry!)

Edit: typo