Importing Excel Data using Simple Table

[Music] The simplest way of using Excel with the Power BI service is just to take a standard Excel spreadsheet and upload it into Power BI and start using the data straight away, it’s a really simple process, let me show you. I've got an Excel workbook here, with a set of data in it just some simple sales, financial information, some product sales information about the segment that we were selling into, what country it was in, the products got sold, whether there was a discount applied and the metrics about, you know, the number of units, the price, the total discount sales etc, etc.

One of the key things that you need to do before you can upload this to Power BI is just to format your Excel document appropriately, excuse me, all it means is making sure that this data is assigned as a table in Excel. So if you haven’t already, all you need to do is come to the Insert tab and choose this insert table option. It’s greyed out because I've already created a table here. Once you have done that just save the Excel document. Let’s close Excel and let’s go back to Power BI.

When you go to Get Data you want to choose to import some data from a file and in this case, I've actually just got a local file sitting on my computer, the Excel file is just local to my machine but I could also connect to a file that I've saved to OneDrive. Now if you are using OneDrive for Business to collaborate on that Excel file or to just store it in a central place so that you can access across all the devices and you know, you can go and make changes to that document and it'll get tracked every time, OneDrive is a great place to do that and we can connect straight to there from Power BI.

We'll talk more about that later on but for now we're just going to use a local file. So that’s my financial sample document and that Excel document just gets uploaded into the Power BI service and you'll see it appears as a dataset here on the left-hand side. And from here on when I click on it I can see here’s all the columns that’ve just been pulled in straight from that Excel document and I can start building reports straight away. As I start to drag fields over, visualizations will get pulled up and created automatically. So it’s really simple just to take an existing piece of Excel content, upload it to Power BI and just start working with the data automatically.