I’m at a loss at the best way to import an excel file as a data source into PBI.
The issue I’m having is, my company forces a password change every 3 months. And every time my password is changed I need to re-enter my username and password for the excel files.
With power bi online I’m using an on premise gateway which connects to my excel files stored on my
on premise network for my organisation (an “M” drive).
Then when I update my password I need to go into every excel file data source and update the username and password on the pbi online service.
I thought that I’d test using a sharepoint directory to store an excel file instead but it turns out this is even worse. I actually needed to re-add my gateway connection for the sharepoint file after my password change. It wasn’t enough to go back into the power bi desktop file, clear and re-enter my permissions, re-publish the file, and refresh the file on PBI online. This still gave an error (even though the PBI desktop file didn’t give an error). I actually needed to delete the existing gateway connection for the sharepoint file, and re-load the gateway connection for the file. This finally fixed the sharepoint error and refresh now works again.
I work for a fairly small organisation so storing my excel files on the network and re-entering credentials every 3 months is fine but how do bigger organisations do it? Do I need to upload the excel file to the PBI online service or something like that? Is there any way to get around this issue, I should not have to re-enter my user name and password every 3 months for all of my excel connections, this is quite annoying and weird that i’m getting all these issues with something that should be fairly straight forward.
Appreciate any assistance,
Thanks,
Tim