Hi everyone,
Our organization has been pulling data from Power BI into connected Excel Workbooks for a number of years. Prior to this year, we were using the Power BI Publisher Add-in in Excel. I'm aware that the Add-In was retired earlier this year:
https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Service/Power-BI-Publisher-for-Excel-Retired/td-p/939988
We have since shifted to using Analyze in Excel. However, we noticed recently that staff were reporting their old Excel workbooks had stopped pulling new data from Power BI, as of around 2/27/21.
I did some digging, and it looks like these are all Excel workbooks that use the data connection defintion format provided by the old Power BI publisher add-in, which has this element:
Data Source=pbiazure://;Location="https://wabi-west-us-redirect.analysis.windows.net//xmla?vs=sobe_wowvirtualserver&db={GUID}&app=PBIA... Properties="DataSource=pbiazure://";
In workbooks created with Analyze in Excel, this has changed to:
Data Source=pbiazure://api.powerbi.com;
When I replace that section of the data connection definition in the old workbooks, it begins to pull in new data.
What makes this a significant challenge for us is two things:
- Excel provides no error when it's using the old format, the refresh happens without error, there is just no new data past 2/27/21.
- We've handed out these types of Excel workbooks for years to staff across our 1500 person agency and it would be nearly impossible to track them all down.
This means staff may be operating off of incorrect data and would require a large effort across the agency to track down, pull back and correct all the Excel files.
I understand Microsoft's stated support for this add-in stopped June 1st, but have a couple of questions for you all.
- Did anyone see any sort of announcement or change log from Microsoft that indicated what would break this on that date of 2/27/21?
- Is anyone else encountering this, and if so, how are you handling it/have you found a workaround that avoids needing to manually change all these Excel files?
Thanks everyone!
