It’s now possible to make an Excel PivotTable directly from PowerBI data in Excel 365 for Windows and Excel on the web.
Microsoft PowerBI is a cloud-based data accumulation then reporting and visualization (dashboards etc). BI stands for “Business Intelligence”. PowerBI is a separately licensed product for businesses so it’s only available if your organization is setup for it.
Connections to PowerBI are already available via Insert | Get Data | From Power Platform then either Dataflows or Dataverse.
What’s new is the ability to get PowerBI data directly into an Excel PivotTable. If your organization has PowerBI enabled you might see a new option at Insert | PivotTable | From PowerBI.
Then choose a dataset from the selection provided by your organization and depending on the permissions your account has.
Once connected you can do most of the fun things possible with PivotTables such as:
- Arranging the fields using the Field List
- Slicers to filter the dataset even more
- Refresh the data from PowerBI to include the latest info
What you can’t do is drag-and-drop to aggregate numeric fields. That’s a job for PowerBI measures.
Obviously, your account must have permission to access the PowerBI data, that can happen in various ways:
A user could have this permission in several ways, such as
- a Member role in the workspace containing the dataset,
- a report or dashboard shared to them that uses the dataset,
- Build permission for the dataset, in either a workspace or an app that contains the dataset.
Microsoft Information Protect (MIP) Labels are inherited by datasets used in Excel.
Who gets it?
PivotTables from PowerBI is a new feature that’s gradually rolling out to what Microsoft calls “Excel for Microsoft 365” which seems to mean Excel 365 for Windows only. No software version is given but presumably a recent release.
Also Excel in a web browser.
Of course, the Microsoft account sign-in has to be linked to an organization with PowerBI.
If that weren’t enough, this feature is being gradually rolled out so, at the time of writing, might not yet be available to your organization.
New Edition: PivotTables and PivotCharts from scratch
Extra linked data types in Excel 365
