Hey all,
This might not be exactly the right forum to post this question in, but I'm sure some here will have some insight.
Awhile ago I had to convert a PBIX file from a colleague in another office to conform to my office's needs. When I got the file, I noticed he had all the connections to the Excel files he used mapped to his Sharepoint using his C: drive. I knew this wouldn't work for our needs, so I found out about using this "DavWWWRoot" address.
If you open the Excel file you want to use via sharepoint, and copy the URL location from inside the file information, you can use the link from there to map to the Excel file. This allows any user to be able to launch and refresh the PBIX file after they've updated the Excel file(s) needed.
So by doing this, I connect directly to the Excel file via our company's network Sharepoint address.
This is one of those things that I don't know how or why it works.... But it does. I haven't been able to find much reliable information about using this method online. Sometimes, the connection will break in Power BI and you have to launch Internet explorer to re-establish it. I found this out after trial and error and some Googling. That in and of itself makes me worry that this might not be a sustainable method for mapping files when IE reaches its end-life in August.
Does anyone have the rundown on exactly what this is? Does? How it works? If there are better alternatives for making connections?
Example below:
\\mycompany.sharepoint.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot\sites\Finance\Shared Documents\Accounting\Accounting Resource Files\Accountant Information.xlsx
