From the course: Power BI Essential Training

Save files for use in Power BI - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Power BI Essential Training

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Save files for use in Power BI

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- [Instructor] If you are working along with me, and haven't yet downloaded the exercise files for this course, you're going to want to do that next. Go to the Overview page for the course. Click the Show All link, next to exercise files, and download the exercise file archive or zip file, the file that begins with ex_files. That file will now be in your downloads folder, but you can move it anywhere you wish. I dropped mine on the desktop. The archive file has a long name. I renamed mine PBI2022 X-files, and I suggest you do the same or something similar. After you've moved this archive, extract all the files. You can either right click and choose extract all from the shortcut menu, or double click on the archive to open it, and click the extract all button. Remember where the resulting folder is located. That's what you need to do. If you need to pause the video and download and extract the archive, do that now. Next, open your OneDrive for business and click the open folder button. We're going to store the files we just extracted in the cloud. I'm going to take the folder that I extracted, and I'm simply going to drag it and drop it in OneDrive, anywhere but in another folder. Here it is. So name it a name that works for you and put it in your OneDrive for business. We store our files that we want to use in Power BI somewhere in the cloud, because that makes them easily refreshable by Power BI, and it also means that you can have multiple people working on them. Think of it this way, if I was to connect to a data source that was on my local machine, I'd have to give Power BI permission to come crawl around on my desktop computer, to check and see if a file's been updated, so it could refresh data. I don't want Power BI to do that, and it would be a little scary if I could let it do that. And the most common places that you and I will store files would be in our OneDrive for Business, or somewhere in SharePoint, so that we can easily then have that file be updated. Files that we save in this way become automatically refreshable by Power BI Desktop, which we'll look at later in this course.

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