How to export a model from Power BI Desktop to Excel Power Pivot (in 2024)
How do we export models from PBI to Excel?
There is an old post with the same question here.
That post was made back in 2019. Whenever this question comes up, people steer it to another place and try to explain how you can move models from Excel to PBI desktop. That is not the goal. The goal is to move models from the PBI desktop into Excel.
Has anything changed in the last five years? Are there any approaches for moving a tabular model from this Fabric ecosystem back into a basic Excel Power Pivot document? I'm guessing this is not supported. Furthermore, I'm guessing that it isn't in Microsoft's interest to support it or even give us the tools that would allow us to do it independently.
Setting aside the model itself, even the power queries are almost impossible to move from Power BI to Excel. You would have to open the advanced query view and copy/paste them all one at a time, to move them from Power BI desktop back to Excel.
I'm at a loss for why this has to be so difficult. The models in Excel and PBI desktop are compatible enough, and if an export/import is allowed in one direction, then it should be allowed in the other direction as well. Why does the company disallow us from easily porting our models and power queries back to the Excel side (Power Pivot)?
Any tips would be appreciated. Maybe I'm missing something obvious. As it is now, I started digging into the zip/xml format of PBIX and XLSX files, and found some interesting information about where DataMashup is stored under the covers (link below). But I can't imagine that the average model developer wants to get this far into the weeds. There has to be another way.
Link to storage format for DataMashup in an xlsx file:
https://bengribaudo.com/blog/2020/04/22/5198/data-mashup-binary-stream
How to export a model from Power BI Desk...