Power BI Blog: Copy vs. Export Data from Power BI Desktop

Welcome back to this week’s Power BI blog series. This week, we are going to look at a few ways to export data from Power BI.

Recently, Microsoft was collecting users’ opinions on how they could improve the copy vs. export related task in Power BI. You can find out more about it here if you are interested (although the survey might be closed by the time you read this article). I appreciated their efforts, and I’m looking forward to seeing more on the subject published soon.

In the meantime, I want to talk about a couple of ways I’ve been using to export data from Power BI. Why do I need to export data from Power BI? I often have Power BI read and transform my PDF files, and I wish to export the cleaned data back to Excel for further usage.

From the Report view, I choose the Table visual:

Then, I drag all the fields from my dataset to the table fields:

My visual should now appear like the one below. I click on the three-dotted icon next to the visual (known as the ellipses), where I find the first option is ‘Export data’. I choose that and my table data will be saved as an Excel file.

I could do it a different way. From the Power Query Editor, I click on the top left-hand side’s little table icon and choose the first option ‘Copy Entire Table’. Next, I just go to Excel and paste the data table there. It’s worth noting here that you should always check if it pastes all the existing data, since I sometimes see my copied data stops at 1,000 rows, although I may have more rows than that. If that’s the case, I will use the first method: exporting data from the Report view.

Easy-peasy, right? That’s it for this week. Check back next week for more Power BI tips.

In the meantime, please remember we offer training in Power BI which you can find out more about >here. If you wish to catch up on past articles, you can find all of our past Power BI blogs here.