How to correctly manage excell sheets to work well in Power BI

[RickyBurton]

Hello,

So the company I work for is thinking of using Power BI for visual aid, and I have been put in charge of building a project to demonstrate its use.

Now the issue I have is that the companies Excel Spreadsheets are a mixture of tables, pivot tables. what is the best way to work with the data as I opened it in a folder and ended up with a lot of Null empty colums?

is there a best way to set out your spreadsheets?

Also if i use the relationship function, i have Works order numbers on all the spreadsheet would it be a case of linking them via this?

[v-shex-msft · Accepted solution]

HI @RickyBurton,

You can try to use import mode to load these data model from excel to power bi, it may fix the null column issue.

In addition, you can also try to remove these blank column and rows in power query.

Get data from Excel workbook files

Regards,

XIaoxin Sheng

[TheOckieMofo]

Power BI works best with Excel files that are hosted in OneDrive for business. If you don't have access to OneDrive for business (such as with my company) then your best bet is to have an actual power pivot model on your excel file. Then you basically import the model into the power bi service and it works awesomely.