Connecting to Excel Data in Power BI

Connecting to Excel data in Power BI is nice and easy. Here are the basics.

The full written post is below, but the video version (only 3 min!) and the original post is over on the "How To Use Power BI" website.

Connecting Power BI Desktop to an Excel file is super easy. From the canvas, you can click either the green “Import data from Excel” button that is on the canvas when a report doesn’t have data connected to it yet.

Or, you can click the “Excel workbook” button in the Data section of the Home Ribbon.

Or you can click “Get Data” in the Home Ribbon and navigate to the Excel Workbook option, then click “Connect”.

Doing any of the above three options will open up a file navigator window, where you navigate to your Excel file, select it and click “Open”.

You’ll then get a Power BI Navigator window that will give you a list of tabs in your Excel file. Select one to get a preview of the data. Check a checkbox to activate the “Load” button at the bottom. Click “Load”.

Power BI then works for a bit (the more data you have, the longer this will take, but it’s usually just 5-10 seconds with small datasets). Once it’s loaded, you can see your data in the Data Pane, and also in the Table and Model views of your report.

If you need help finding your Data Pane, the Table View, or the Model View, check out our Intro to the User Interface Post.