Excel Workbook with Excel Data Model

[Music] So you have looked at how you can just take a simple Excel table and upload it to Power BI. If you are familiar with some of the older Excel BI capabilities, things like Power Pivot and Power View, you can use that content and upload that to Power BI as well. If you have used Power pivot to pull in data from different data sources or if you are just using it to manage multiple tables that are in your Excel workbook, Power BI will understand that and translate that into a Power BI model and if you have used Power View to create those interactive worksheets in your Excel workbook, we’ll turn those into Power BI reports when that gets uploaded too.

Let’s take a look. So I've got my Excel workbook here with a little bit more information in it this time. I have built a pivot table based of a Power Pivot model, so you can see on my Power Pivot window, I’ve pulled in a few different tables of data here, I've got Date table, I've got some sales information, I've got some product information etc. I've also got in this workbook, some Power View sheets. For example, I've got some graphs and charts here that show me some more interactive content. Taking this and uploading it to Power BI is just the same process as for a simple Excel spreadsheet. I am not going to save any changes to that workbook.

The workbook is just sitting here on my file system again. So let’s go back to Power BI and go through the same process, it’s as easy as just hitting Get Data, choosing files, again I'll connect to something locally on my machine, this would work just the same if you were using OneDrive for Business, I could connect to an Excel workbook with all that BI content in it stored in OneDrive for Business and that’ll get uploaded to Power BI again. Now we'll start importing that data and you can see things appearing on the left-hand side.

I've got a dataset here, which is just basically a connection to the data model that was inside that Excel workbook and I've got a report here, which is still importing, it will change colour in a second, there we go. And this is effectively that Power View content, so when I click on this, I'll see the same charts and graphs as I had before. And they’re just as interactive you know, they have been turned into Power BI content and I can even carry on editing them and making changes to this report here within Power BI.

So, if you've got that existing content that was created in Excel using Power View or Power Pivot, you can upload that and use that in Power BI just the same way as you would do any other Excel content.