I’ve started working with PowerBI Desktop these days for data visualization. It didn’t take long to hit some limits on portability when using an Excel sheet as a data source.
So, I decided to import the Excel sheets into SQL, and then connect PowerBI Desktop to the SQL database.
- First, I created a new SQL database.
- Then, right-click the database, Tasks > Import Data
- Select the Excel sheet you wish to import and the version.
- For destination, select SQL Server Native Client 11.0 and specify the SQL Server instance, authentication method and database
- You then have the option of editing mappings and previewing the import.
- Then proceed with the import.
Once the import was complete, I connected a new PowerBI Desktop to my database.