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Use the right Microsoft surface for the job: Teams for Q&A, Power BI/Excel for consumption

Summary: Olivier Mikéladzé discusses the integration of Databricks with Microsoft applications like Power BI and Excel, highlighting that Databricks supports deep connectivity for publishing datasets and secure authentication. They explain that Genie should be used for conversational analytics within Teams or virtual agents. Conversely, Power BI and Excel should serve as the primary interfaces for dashboards, semantic modeling, and analysis. They also provide useful links for further guidance.
AI Summary

Databricks supports deep Power BI connectivity for publishing datasets, connecting to SQL warehouses, and secure enterprise auth, while the Excel add-in is designed for direct access to governed lakehouse data and Metric Views. In practice, that means Genie should handle conversational analytics in Teams or agents, while Power BI and Excel should remain the main surfaces for dashboards, semantic models, and spreadsheet-style analysis.

Some links to guide you below ⬇️

https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/partners/bi/power-bi

https://www.databricks.com/blog/whats-new-azure-databricks-fabcon-2026-lakebase-lakeflow-and-genie

1 comment
Simon Kuijpers
1 week, 5 days ago

I've been using Databricks Genie in Teams discussions. It allows me to get answers to questions during the conversation, instead of having to follow up. Speeds up processes, it's great!

Olivier Mikéladzé
2 weeks, 1 day ago