Does DirectQuery Load Data into Power BI Desktop?

[raymond]

Hi Community,

a couple of my clients have really sensitive data that should not be send out of the organisation. But I am creating dashboards for them on my local machine outside their infrastructure and  using power BI Desktop. 

Can I use directquery to create suche reports and even test it with data and without loading the data into power BI? The goal is to not save any data onto my computer. I heard this is what directquery does but I am not sure whether Power BI loads and saves a snap shot of the data onto the local machine anyway.

[v-yuezhe-msft · Accepted solution]

@raymond,

In DirectQuery mode, data is stored in data source, Power BI Desktop will not load data or save snapshot of data onto local machine.

In your scenario, please make sure that your data source supports DirectQuery mode in Power BI, for more details, please review this article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-directquery-data-sources.

Regards,
Lydia