I’ve be dabbling with Power BI Desktop to build a dashboard for a client and thought I’d share just how easy it is to connect an unencrypted Access database to Power BI Desktop to be able to produce some truly nice charts.
I emphasize Unencrypted, so no password on the database, as Microsoft has made it more complicated to connect to encrypted Access databases (that will be covered in my next post).
So let’s get started.
- First launch Power BI Desktop
- Click on Get data from the Home tab
- From the dropdown, click on More…
- From the Get Data dialog, scroll down and select Access database and click on Connect
- From the file dialog, go select your Access database to connect to and then click on Open
- In the Navigation dialog, simply select the tables/queries you want to add to Power BI to work with to create your charts and click on Load and wait while Power BI does its thing.
It’s that simple. You are now ready to start building your chart(s)!
Be sure to check out my second part to this article which covers connecting an encrypted database to Power BI Desktop:
Connecting Power BI Desktop To An Encrypted Access Database
In my previous article, I examined connecting Power BI Desktop to an unencrypted Access database. You can read all the details at: What About Encrypted (Password Protected) Databases? Now, since every database should be encrypted as data should never be unsecured, I then turned my attention to connecting Power BI Desktop to a password…
A Few Resources on the Subject
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