Migrating from Power Pivot for Excel to Power BI
Given the maturity of Power BI as a platform and the increased comfort level with Power BI Desktop among users, it’s often beneficial to migrate semantic models (formerly Power Pivot) and M queries from Excel to Power BI. From a data management and governance standpoint, it is preferable to consolidate semantic models to either Power BI and/or Analysis Services models and to limit Excel’s role to ad hoc analysis, such as pivot tables connected to semantic models in the Power BI service via Analyze in Excel.
In this recipe, a semantic model and its source M queries contained in an Excel workbook are migrated to a Power BI semantic model, via the Import Excel Workbook to Power BI Desktop migration feature. Additional details on the workbook content imported, and other options and considerations for Excel-to-Power BI migrations, are included in the How it works and There’s more... sections.