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excelpowerbipowerpivot
Randy Minder
Randy Minder

Reputation: 48402

Sharing Excel Workbooks and Power Pivot models

We'd like to share our Excel workbooks and Power Pivot models among our corporate user base for viewing. It seems we have at least two choices. One is SharePoint and the other is Power BI Service (Power BI Online). Is one more preferred than the other? Or are there other ways to accomplish this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1023

Answers (1)

Marcus
Marcus

Reputation: 541

There is another way if you happen to have an SQL server with SSAS running in tabular mode (which is what power pivot is based off of), since you are able to have excel connect to and query it. Excel would then though pivot tables would then be able to query the server and display the data. This was also possible with SSAS multidimensional OLAP cubes.

The advantage here is that it would be a central place for all the calculations and logic thus making rolling out changes more consistent. Plus the fact that other tools can also query SSAS tabular, for example SSRS.

It is also possible to import power pivot models into SSAS tabular article. Though certain features like linked tables in excel will not be supported.

Microsoft help page on how to do this Connect to a Tabular model

Edit:

From having done this at my old work with SSAS multidimensional, the connection setup is just a one time per user. Since afterwards the connection can be selected from Data --> Existing connections if they want to create a new pivot using the tabular model as a source.

In theory connections could be pushed to users, since excel stores connection files in the following file path:

C:\Users\ ... \Documents\My Data Sources

Plus in theory you could then use multiple platforms to display the data based on their needs. E.g. some users run off excel, some leverage visualization tools like Power BI desktop or Tableau.

Upvotes: 2

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