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Refresh from access restricted Excel workbook

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mmilirud on 17 Nov 2016 05:05:06

In addition to password protecting workbooks, Excel also supports restricting access based on users (ACL). It's a common practice to ACL workbooks in Excel to limit access to confidential data, that is used as a data source for PBI reports/dashboards. Today Power BI fails to refresh from access restricted Excel workbook, and one has to save a copy, stripped of access restrictions, use that to refresh Power BI report, and then manually republish. Auto-refresh doesn't work, essentially making operationalization of PowerBI reports based on Excel workbooks containing confidential data impossible, even if the report doesn't pull confidential data itself from the workbook.

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6379de53 0673-4582-b6b4-b1dc9aaf7ad9 on 05 Jul 2020 23:51:38

RE: Refresh from access restricted Excel workbook

I agree totally, I have the same situation and it is shame I can't connect to restricted excel files.
Although I am using Power Query in excel, but I am sure it is the same for Power BI