Power BI – Connecting Power BI to Exchange (Outlook)

By: David Rohlfs

Introduction

Monitoring many email addresses or working in an industry with lots of security concerns? Connecting to Exchange through Power BI means that you can monitor your accounts activity through a Power BI Report!

In this blog we will go through connecting Microsoft Power BI to Exchange (Outlook), when you should do this, and some common problems that you may encounter.

When to use it

Just like most other things in Power BI, there are many reasons to connect to Exchange in Power BI, but the main topics that are available are People, Mail, Calendar, Tasks, and Meeting Requests. From a personal use point of view, it would be very beneficial to see outstanding meeting requests, the number of unread emails, or even just daily tasks that need to be completed alongside some real data inside of the same Power BI report. From a corporate view, you can easily determine the average days an email goes unread, the number of outstanding tasks a group has, or even doing statistics on schedules.

Common Problems

Emails aren’t the same format.

When I was originally setting this up, my goal was to pull out all undelivered email addresses from a large list of marketing contacts. When I saw that there were about 8,000 undeliverable email addresses, I decided to use this process to come up with a list of the good and bad addresses. In doing this, it became evident that most emails are formatted differently, even if they are on the same topic. To fix my filters in Power BI and in Power Query, I ended up using a lot of “Contains” filters and trying to extract the failed address. After trying a few different methods, I ended up getting as many emails as I could just in the normal system, then doing the rest of the entry manually. This is a good lesson in remembering that we can’t always change the originating data to fix the problem. While it is normally best practice to fix the issue at the root of the problem, this wasn’t an option.

• Now that AI has become such a big part of the business world, there are ways to solve this issue with an AI Agent or with the Fabric Capacity Copilot AI.

Walkthrough

In this walkthrough we are only going to go through connecting to Exchange and getting access to the data.

First, with the Power BI desktop open, click on Get Data > More.

Next, type in “Exchange” to the search bar and choose the “Microsoft Exchange Online” option and click OK.

Now we need to type in the email address that we are going to connect to.

After this you will need to authenticate your account.

Next, you will have a pop up appear. This is the normal interface for selecting Queries from your data source.

I am going to choose my Mail query and click Load to load the table to my model. This will allow me to see all of my emails related to this account.

Conclusion

You can see now that connecting to your email from Power BI really isn’t difficult at all. All you need is access to the email account you are connecting to and the knowledge of how to do it. I’ve found this very helpful when trying to display someone’s tasks they have or for filtering emails.

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