How to Connect to an Excel Workbook in Power BI Desktop

Connect to an Excel workbook data source in Power BI Desktop

In this video, you’ll learn how to connect to an Excel workbook data source in Power BI Desktop. Connect to Microsoft’s AdventureWorks dataset to begin working with data for the first time in Power BI Desktop.

Hi, this is Matt with Playfair+. In today’s video, we’re going to connect to data and walk you through those first crucial steps in your data visualization journey. Let’s jump in. 

We’re going to walk through getting connected to data. So right now I am on the Report view, and then the first thing we’re going to do is click on Get data.

All of the existing common data sources are listed here. If you click on more, it will take you to the full list of connectable data sources. And the great thing about Power BI is that these generally interact very similarly. So if you know how to connect to Excel, you’re more than likely going to be able to connect to many of these other things.

So, I know Google Analytics is a popular connection. The online systems are a little more complicated, but we’re going to start with Excel, just because it’s pretty straightforward. Before we went in, I think everybody was able to do the download for our AdventureWorks dataset.

So what we’re going to do is watch me live, connect to our AdventureWorks dataset.

And if not, I have one already prebuilt, so we can just go in that way. But let’s go ahead and see here. Okay.

Make sure we got everything available.

Alright. You can see I’ve downloaded it a few times. We’re going to click on AdventureWorks sales and just go ahead and click on Open. So as we walk through this, we will see, alright, here are our active report tables that we want connect to, and I think there’s seven. So we’re going to do Customer, Date, Product, Reseller, Sales, SalesOrder, and SalesTerritory.

From this stage, you have two options really. We have Load and Transform Data. Clicking Load will just take you directly in, back to Power bi, back to the report pane, and your data will show up over on the right-hand side in the data pane. Now you should understand connecting to data at a basic level in Power BI.

Thanks for watching. We hope you stay tuned to many more Playfair+ videos. Thanks.