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Connecting Excel to Power BI as an External Tool

Erik Svensen adds to the External Tools parade:

When I build models – I use Excel pivot tables to test and validate my measures and typically I would use DAX Studio to find the localhost port to setup a connection to the currently open PBIX file.

So, I thought it be nice just to click a button in PowerBI Desktop to open a new Excel workbook with a connection to the current model. That would save me a couple of clicks.

If I could create an ODC file when clicking on the button in Power BI and then open the ODC file (Excel is the default application to open these) my idea would work.

And that’s exactly what Erik has done, using Powershell to do the work.