So two new exciting capabilities were announced recently in Power BI.  One involved Excel and the other SSRS, but they both involved pinning.  Microsoft announced the ability to pin certain visuals from SSRS to a Power BI dashboard and also the ability to pin a range from an Excel workbook to a dashboard.  A blog about my SSRS pinning adventure is forthcoming.

Today’s post is focused on the Excel range pinning to a Power BI Dashboard.  As always, a customer of mine was working through the example provide in the Power BI online documentation, which by the way is great, and ran into an an issue.  When the person attempted to connect to the workbook in Power BI the connect button was missing.  As seen in the Figure 1-1.

I was kind of puzzled initially, but after reading through this link I found the following important thing to know:

“You can’t connect to a whole Excel file again if you’re already connected to it. But you can connect to a single file both as a whole Excel workbook and as a dataset. The whole Excel file appears under Reports in the left navigation pane, and the workbook-as-dataset appears under Datasets.”

So what does that exactly mean?  Well in short, if you have already Imported the workbook using the button labeled Import in Figure 1-2 you cannot connect to it again.  You will need to delete that connection by removing the dataset and all corresponding collateral and reconnect using the button labeled Connect in Figure 1-2.

After that, you will be able to connect and pin ranges from the Excel workbook.

Talk to you soon,

Patrick LeBlanc

Data Platform Solutions Architect