Power BI - Excel sheet data needs Excel Tables

I've not written a blog post in far too long.  Now with the preview of Power BI as a free service (try it here: www.powerbi.com), I wanted to reinvigorate my blog with a few new posts. 

As a member of the "customer success team", I get to see what questions people are asking and offering solutions.  In the last day or two I've responded to 3 or 4 customers all trying to get the data in the Excel files to be uploaded to Power BI correctly.

The most common issue I've seen is that the data in the Excel worksheet is not in an Excel Table.  The solution is really easy: on each worksheet, select the data range for your  and then press "CTRL + T" to make the data into an Excel Table.   You can also use the Table option in the Insert ribbon in excel. With this done, you can upload the Excel file and each of the tables will be present in the data set created for the workbook. 

You can read all the details in our article here:

https://support.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/424871-excel-data

HTH,

Lukasz