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How to Share Data Among Excel, Power BI Desktop, and PowerBI.com

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Excel tables or worksheets and Excel Power Pivot are popular sources of data for Power BI Desktop models. Sometimes, you may also want to view the Power BI Desktop model (or a PowerBI.com data model) back in Excel as a pivot table or simply export a table back to Excel. Here are some of the options.
Steps:

  1. Importing an Excel table or worksheet into a Power BI Desktop data model: Click Get Data, Excel. Once you have chosen the source workbook, you can preview and/or select tables and/or worksheets from the Navigator dialog. Tables have a small blue bar across the top. If a table has the same name as a worksheet, the table will have a numeric suffix (e.g. Customer5 in the screenshot). Load takes you straight to report design, Edit invokes Power Query in case you want to do some data transformations.

    Excel Navigator


  2. Importing an Excel Power Pivot data model into a Power BI Desktop data model: Click the drop-down button to the left of the Home tab. Choose Import, Excel workbook contents.

    Import an Excel workbook


  3. Importing a Power BI Desktop data model table into an Excel table: Open the Power BI Desktop pbix file and leave it open. In Excel, click Add-ins, DAX Studio (you will need to have downloaded and installed the free and wonderful DAX Studio). In the DAX Studio Connect dialog, click PBI / SSDT Model and click Connect – it should automatically pick up the name of the open pbix file. Note the port number after the localhost server name in the status bar, e.g. localhost:55641 – this is needed in step 4. From the Home tab, click Output, Excel, Static. Type an evaluate query for a table of interest (see screenshot) and click Run. Switch to Excel to see the data – you can now make this a table (Ctrl-T) and/or add it to Power Pivot (Power Pivot tab, Add to Data Model). Leave the pbix open for the next step.

    Import Power BI Desktop data model table info an Excel table


  4. Connecting an Excel pivot table to a Power BI Desktop data model: On the Data tab, click Get Data, From Database, From Analysis Services. Enter the server name and port from step 3 (e.g. localhost:55641). Click Next, Finish, PivotTable Report, OK.

    Connecting Excel pivot table to a Power BI Desktop data model


  5. Connecting an Excel pivot table to a PowerBI.com data model: In Excel click the Power BI tab (you need to have installed the free Power BI Publisher for Excel). Click Connect to Data. Select one of your PowerBI.com workspaces, click Dataset, choose one of your published datasets and click Connect to see your pivot table in excel. You can also use Analyze in Excel directly from within PowerBI.com.

    Connecting Excel pivot table to a PowerBI.com data model


There are many other options for sharing data between Excel and Power BI that are not covered here. For example, you can publish an Excel pivot table to PowerBI.com.

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