Category: Excel Reports

Building Business Central Excel Reports with Copilot

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

Organizations rely on Business Central for operational and financial reporting, but many teams still export data to Excel when they need flexible analysis, custom layouts, or presentation‑ready visuals. Traditionally, this meant a significant amount of manual work: formatting, building pivot tables, adding calculated fields, and assembling dashboards.

What’s changed recently isn’t just one new feature, it’s the combination of Copilot capabilities across M365, and how they now naturally show up inside of Excel. When you put Excel Copilot, Agent Mode, and in‑place editing together, Excel stops being a passive spreadsheet tool and starts acting like an active reporting assistant.

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The comprehensive guide to using Business Central Excel Report Metadata with refreshable APIs

The comprehensive guide to using Business Central Excel Report Metadata with refreshable APIs

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP6 Comments

Excel Reports are extremely useful when you need a detailed dataset. They not only provide a denormalized dataset, but also facilitate the creation of meaningful data connections, pivot charts, visualizations and more. A notable drawback has been the cumbersome process of generating an Excel Report from Business Central. This involves running a report request page, downloading the file, then opening and enabling the workbook before you can access any data. Moreover, once the report is generated, you are left with a static dataset that lacks a refresh option. This means the data remains unchanged from the moment the report was run.

In Business Central 23.3 we were given the ability to create refreshable datasets by calling Business Central APIs from within Excel. Here is a deep dive into how you can create a refreshable Excel Report Layout — all you need is a Business Central API and a Report.

[NOTE]: This blog post was written before the release of BC25 (2024 release wave 2). Extensive improvements have been made to make connecting to APIs through Excel Report Layouts easier. So if you are working with BC25, please check out this blog post

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