Exporting Data from Power BI Desktop to Excel and CSV – Part 1: Copy & Paste and DAX Studio Methods

Update 2019 April: If you’re interested in exporting the data model from either Power BI Desktop or Power BI Service to CSV or SQL Server check this out. The method explained here is only applicable for Power BI Premium or Embedded capacities with XMLA endpoints connectivity.

One of the features that is asked a lot on Power BI community is how to export Power BI desktop data to Excel OR CSV.

Note: I’d like to make it clear that in this article we are NOT interested in exporting data from a visual in a report to CSV.

The first question lots of you might have is “How on earth someone wants to export data from a Power BI Desktop model to Excel OR CSV?”.

Power BI brings Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View and Power Map together in one piece of software. So why not using Excel at the first place to load data from the source? There might be lots of other questions about the reasons that someone wants to export data from Power BI Desktop model to Excel (or any other destinations). The reason could be one of the following that someone wants to export data from Power BI Desktop model to other destinations like Excel, CSV, SQL Server etc.

For some reason you have just a Power BI Desktop file (PBIX) and you don’t have access to the data sources and you need to provide the data to someone who is not familiar with Power BI

You Power BI Desktop consolidates lots of different sources in a single model and it would be very hard to get the same output as you get in Power BI Desktop model in Excel. So an export feature can be super handy

You might have done lots of complex transformations in Power BI Query Editor and replication the same logic on the source system could be much more complex and time consuming, so again exporting data from a current Power BI Desktop model makes sense

You have a bunch of calculated columns created in DAX and you don’t want to go back and redo all the hard works you have already done in Power BI in another environment like Excel

You might want to use the current Power BI data in Cortana Analytics

You are just curious to see if it is possible

None of the above!

But, the reality is that regardless of the reason, lots of people still want to export data from Power BI Desktop to different destinations. So let’s have a look at different workarounds until this feature is not available in Power BI. I’ll explain different ways to export Power BI Desktop data in a series of articles. In this post you learn how to copy Power BI Desktop data to a destination file like Excel or CSV without any third-party software involved. I also explain how easy you can export Power BI Desktop data to CSV using DAX Studio.

Copy Data from Data View in Power BI Desktop and Paste it to Destination

The easiest workaround is simply copy/paste data from Data view in Power BI Desktop.

Open your Power BI Desktop model

Switch to Data view by clicking on Data tab

You have now 3 options to copy data:

Right click on a desired table and click “Copy Table”

Click a desired table then from the ribbon, click “Copy”

Click a desired table, right click on data area then click “Copy Table”

Now open a new Excel file and paste the copied data

Pros:

You can copy the entire table, including all DAX calculated columns, very easily and paste it on a destination like Excel or a text editor and save it as TXT or CSV files

You copy transformed and probably cleansed data in case you have done any data transformation in Query Editor

No third party tool is needed/involved

Cons:

If for any reason you want to paste the data in SQL Server, this might not be the best way to get the job done

This way is good for small volume of data. If you want to copy a larger amount of data than some thousands rows, say even 64,000 rows, then the copy process might take a long time

There is always a risk of missing data as we are copying data into Windows clipboard

Copy Data from Query Editor in Power BI Desktop and Paste it to Destination

Another easy workaround is to copy data from Query editor:

On Power BI Desktop click “Edit Queries” to open Query Editor

Select a desired query

Now you have 2 options:

Click on the tiny table button located on the top left of the table and click “Copy Entire Table”

Press Ctrl+A to select all columns, then press Ctrl+C to copy data or right click on a column header and click “Copy”. You can select multiple columns by pressing Ctrl and clicking on column headers in case you don’t want to copy the entire table.

You can also select different levels of data transformation to be copied.

Now you can paste the data to Excel

Pros:

You can copy the entire table, very easily and paste it on a destination like Excel or a text editor and save it as TXT or CSV files

You can copy multiple selected columns rather than copying the entire table

Not only can you copy transformed data in case you have done any data transformation in Query Editor, but also you can decide which level of transformed data should be copied

No third party tool is needed/involved

Cons:

DAX calculated columns are NOT included

If you use Ctrl+A, you select all columns to be copied which includes complex columns automatically added to the table. For a table like DimDate which potentially has lots of relationships with other tables, you probably don’t like it.

It’s not that easy to export data in other destinations like SQL Server

Poor performance in copying large amount of data

Risk of missing data as we are copying data into Windows clipboard

Export Data from Power BI Desktop to CSV or TXT Using DAX Studio

Update: If you’d like to export the model data as a whole, check this out.

Exporting data from Power BI Desktop to CSV using DAX Studio is super easy. An advantage of using DAX Studio is that it works great regardless of the amount of data you want to export. The other advantage is that you can literally export a query output to CSV which can be very helpful if you don’t want to only export the entire table, but a specific query.

Here is how to get the job done in DAX Studio:

Open a desired Power BI Desktop model

Open DAX Studio

Click “PBI / SSDT Model” then select your Power BI model from the list then click “Connect”

Write a desired DAX query, I’m not going to explain DAX query language in this article, but you can simply write “EVALUATE TABLE_NAME” which “TABLE_NAME” is the name of the table you want to export. So in our case it is “FactInternetSales”

Run, or press F5, to execute the query

Click “Results” tab and make sure you get the expected results

Click “Output” from the ribbon and select “File”

Run the query

Select a folder and enter file name to save the results in TXT or CSV then click “Save”

Now DAX Studio start writing data into the output file

After DAX Studio finished writing data you may open the file

Bottom line: You can easily copy/paste your Power BI Desktop data to a destination like Excel or notepad from Power BI Desktop as explained above. You can also export Power BI data using DAX Studio to CSV very easily. However, the first approach it is useful only when you want to copy small amount of data. DAX Studio is super easy and very powerful tool to export data from Power BI Desktop to CSV or TXT files. But, what if you need to load more data to Excel or even SQL Server?

In my next post I’ll explain how to directly import Power BI Desktop data to Excel, so stay tuned.

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