The title of this post is stolen from the legendary Bob Dylan song, but rightfully so since it’s one of the biggest game changers in the Power BI game (and with their constant updating and adding of brilliant abilities into the product that is saying a lot, even made me post outside of my usual Tuesday morning routine J). This was by far my favourite feature that was presented when I was in Bellevue for the Microsoft Data Insights Summit last week

, so without further ado

Microsoft’s Power BI Publisher for Excel

The best way to get it is here

You can also access it via your Power BI app, just look for the download icon in the top right part of the site.

As you click it, you should see Power BI Publisher for Excel.

Whichever way you arrived at the installment, now you get a tab called Power BI in Excel. And now you can do this…

Let’s say we have a beautiful dashboard already made in our Power BI…

But as always, we also have a great dashboard made in Excel. A Dashboard using some conditional formatting, tables, Sparkline charts, data bars, Icons…

The next step would be to select the parts of Excel that you would like to see in your Power BI dashboard, go to the Power BI tab and choose Pin (yeas it’s the same command you use in Power BI Desktop or Power BI App.

All that’s left to do is to designate the Dashboard in your Power BI that should hold this new visuals

Now hold on to your hats…

Oh yeah, you are seeing this correctly, the selected part of the Excel file is now part of the Power BI dashboard. I’m guessing you feel the need to pinch yourself right now J… Just so the shock doesn’t kill you, it’s still a work in progress, so the Excel objects are not objects anymore but rather the entire range becomes a picture in Power BI, but you can refresh it straight from Excel. You choose Power BI/Pin Manager

Select the desired range and choose Update…

Pure brilliance and definitely a huge step towards eternal happiness J