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Allow PowerBI Designer to connect to Office 365 / OneDrive for Business Datasource

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Rickey Whitworth on 29 May 2015 19:58:25

If you create a query in the online PowerBI site, you can connect to an Excel document on Office 365 or OneDrive as a datasource. This ability does not exist in the designer

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 22:19:17

RE: Allow PowerBI Designer to connect to Office 365 / OneDrive for Business Datasource

the problem is though that my links look like https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=37E11F1F!111&authkey=!AF3Rj6fc&ithint=file%2ccsv (few numbers scrambled so not a real link). There is no domain or structure to start with. It is an example from my personal onedrive. The structure you're talking about is for One Drive Business - they are named the same but they're 2 completely different products - one is a storage, the other sharepoint ersatz. There is no straight folder structure in the free account, including the path in Downloads (it says just onedrive/download.aspx)

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wlopez on 05 Jul 2020 22:17:24

RE: Allow PowerBI Designer to connect to Office 365 / OneDrive for Business Datasource

An additional quote: it is also possible to use an URL from a SharePoint Site. The procedure is similar. Just remove the identifiers (guids, ids) given by SharePoint and use the URL you can get inside the site, not te URL given once the file is open in the browser.

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wlopez on 05 Jul 2020 22:17:23

RE: Allow PowerBI Designer to connect to Office 365 / OneDrive for Business Datasource

It is possible to connect Power BI Desktop to an Excel file located in OneDrive as Miguel says. The key is to grab the URL from OneDrive and make some adjustments.

In my case, the original URL looks like this:

https://tenant-my.sharepoint.com/personal/user_tenant/_layouts/15/WopiFrame.aspx?sourcedoc={96A899A3-FF23-4B7D-AA43-95B5AB1705CA}&file=TestData.xlsx&action=default

And the URL that works in Power BI Desktop look like this:

https://tenant-my.sharepoint.com/personal/user_tenant/Documents/TestData.xlsx

As you can see, you need to remove some stuff associated with the way One Drive exposes the file and clean up the URL so it reflects the correct location.

P.S.: I intentionally replace the tenant name and the user name with the words: tenant and user.

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 22:16:37

RE: Allow PowerBI Designer to connect to Office 365 / OneDrive for Business Datasource

Miguel, in two separate tenants this doe not seem to be working correctly. The result is "Access to the resource is forbidden" no matter what auth method I choose. Any hints?