Excel data import as table versus worksheet?

[troy8]

New to Power BI, but is there a difference in loading excel data thats formatted as a table versus as a excel worksheet?  Does the data show up differently or something?

[v-yuezhe-msft]

Hi @troy8,

I make a simple test by importing data from sheet and table in Excel.

After importing the above sample data to Power BI Desktop, in Query Editor, you can note that for data in Sheet4,  Power BI Desktop promotes the first row of values as the new column headers (i.e. column names) by adding a step ”Promoted Header”. But data shows same in both the sheet and table.

Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

[MarcelBeug]

It should also be noted that Excel tables are much better structured than worksheets.

If you import from a worksheet, you get all data on that worksheet.

If you import from a table, you get the contents of that table, even if there is other data somewhere else on the same worksheet.

And you can have multiple tables on 1 worksheet.

So always try and import from tables, unless there are reasons not to use tables.

[JohanC]

In Power Query I also noticed that the query run time is shorter if imported from a table instead of the whole sheet.