Excel NORM.DIST function in Power Query and Power BI

If you’re looking for Excel functions in Power BI, you will recognize that much more of them have been transformed to native DAX functions than to native M functions in Power Query. One of the basic statistical functions that hasn’t made it to M is the NORM.DIST function. Excel NORM.DIST function in Power Query The … Read more

Fix error “..prod.powerquery.microsoft.com refused to connect” in Power BI dataflows

Today I could not edit any dataflows for a client and was constantly getting “… prod.powerquery.microsoft.com refused to connect”:   Twitterverse to the rescue After a couple of unsuccessful trials I went to the twitterverse to ask around if anyone else was experiencing the same (thinking that there was an issue with the service in … Read more

Workaround to connect to Power BI dataflows from Power Query in Excel

Currently, we cannot connect to Power BI dataflows from Excel Power Query. And as we also cannot use custom connectors in there, we need a different alternative. I’m going to describe how to consume the results from Power BI dataflows as csv-files from Azure Blob Storage. I’m using the “AzureStorage.Blobs” function here, which authenticates with the key of the storage account. So just be aware that this means that you cannot apply role based security here. (Edit: A native connector that supports that is supposed to come soon: Microsoft Power Platform dataflows connector available in Excel – Power Platform Release Plan | Microsoft Docs)

General setup

Usually, when a Power BI dataflow is refreshed, a csv-file will be written to a storage in the background that holds the results of a refreshed entity. But you have the option to “bring your own Data Lake” where these files are written to instead. This then allows you to consume the csv files with the “AzureStorage.Blobs” function in Power Query for Excel instead.

Pragmatic Works have a very good tutorial on how to setup the storage in Azure and connect a new Power BI workspace to it as a prerequisite.

Details to connect to dataflows from Excel

Read more