Can I edit an Excel created/based Power Query in Power BI Desktop

Mike Hutchinson 1 Reputation point
2021-03-30T13:49:30.283+00:00

Can I edit and thereby update a query that was created in, and resides in Excel and will it continue to run with all the edits from the Excel workbook in which it is contained?

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Excel Management
Excel Management
Excel: A family of Microsoft spreadsheet software with tools for analyzing, charting, and communicating data.Management: The act or process of organizing, handling, directing or controlling something.
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  1. Emily Hua-MSFT 27,526 Reputation points
    2021-03-31T08:55:11.687+00:00

    @Mike Hutchinson
    Based on my research, if I load the one Excel file with queries into Power BI Desktop via "Import data from Excel", some changes of source data in Excel file would be updated to the data on Power BI Desktop.

    But there are some limitations, such as you could not modify the applied steps from Excel file in Power BI Desktop, such as the "Grouped Rows" as following image shown. At present, I do not find any related articles that describe these limitations from Microsoft.
    83264-capture74.png

    Besides, according to this thread "Table.FromRecords(recsList, RecFields, MissingField.UseNull) works in PBI but not in excel", there may be a difference between Excel Power Query and Power BI Desktop in the use of a certain function.

    Hope the information could be helpful.

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  2. Mike Hutchinson 1 Reputation point
    2021-03-31T14:23:02.127+00:00

    Thanks for your reply @Emily Hua-MSFT

    I was looking for some of the helps in Power BI (like to tool to view the running steps - forget what that is called)... but sounds like you shouldn't mix Power Query from Excel based queries with m Language as it is in Excel.
    From your answer, it looks clear that m code doesn't round trip between the two.