Chris Webb has some good news:
Some good news: an important optimisation has rolled out for Excel PivotTables connected to Power BI semantic models! Back in 2019 I wrote about a very common problem affecting the MDX generated by PivotTables connected to Analysis Services where, when subtotals are turned off and grand totals are turned on, the query nevertheless returns the subtotal values. This led to extremely slow, expensive MDX queries being run and a lot of complaints. The nice people on the Excel team have now fixed this problem and PivotTables connected to Power BI semantic models generate MDX queries that only return the values needed by the PivotTable.
Read on to see it in action. What’s wild is that I actually get to use the “MDX” tag here. I had to go back and check the four MDX entries prior to this, and Chris is responsible for three of them. That scans.