Today we are excited to announce the initial availability of Power BI connected PivotTables in Excel for the web. As part of our journey to simplify enterprise data discovery and analysis in Excel, this new capability unlocks more ways to consume such analysis from Excel for the web, empowering more users to make critical decisions with the benefits of Excel and Power BI. For example, you can get up-to-date insights by refreshing the PivotTable, or conduct explorations by manipulating the PivotTable fields all in a browser. You can also include live Excel PivotTables connected to Power BI data directly within your Power BI solutions and apps.
Furthermore, a layer of data protection is added by respecting any existing Microsoft Information Protection labels applied to the Power BI datasets as you connect to it with PivotTables in Excel for the web.
This will work on any workbooks in OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, and Teams, as well as those uploaded to the Power BI service. Users will need access to the underlying dataset to interact with PivotTables connected to Power BI datasets (see how to share Power BI datasets). *Note: refresh and interactivity of Power BI datasets with a live connection to Analysis Services in Excel for the web is not supported.
This new feature has started rolling out across Microsoft 365 tenants, and we expect full roll out over the next few months.
Other Improvements
We are making a few other improvements to help you to be more productive with Power BI connected PivotTables.
Drag-and-Drop Aggregations
PivotTables connected to Power BI datasets will now support drag-and-drop aggregation of fields (e.g. sum, average, distinct count, etc.). This helps you to quickly get answers within Excel without needing pre-defined measures in the underlying Power BI datasets.
Date Fields
PivotTables connected to Power BI datasets will now support date fields, which means that date filters timelines, and date sorting will now be available.
Field list updates
In addition, we are making some small modifications to the field list, namely pre-defined measures will now be shown within the table they are stored in. We are also updating some of the icons.
We Made it Faster Too
You may have noticed that PivotTables connected to Power BI also got faster. This is due to the recent updates to the Analysis Service engine in Power BI. Learn more details here: Analysis Services Tabular improves MDX query performance in the cloud.
Support for drag-and-drop aggregations, date fields, and the field list improvements will start rolling out in Excel Windows to Office Insiders soon and will be brought to Excel for web at a later stage.
Getting Started Now
We invite you to try out these new capabilities for yourself as they become available to you in the upcoming weeks. Send us your feedback via Help > Feedback in the app.
To learn more:
- Create a PivotTable from Power BI datasets
- Analyze in Excel for Power BI
- Convert text to an Organization data type
- Follow the Power BI Blog to get the latest Power BI updates and announcements from the Microsoft Business Applications Summit
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