"Just export it to Excel" is one of the most common requests Power BI teams hear — and one of the hardest habits to break, especially in fast-paced, deadline-driven environments like investment banking and finance. The instinct isn't laziness; it's trust, familiarity, and control. Business users know Excel, and they don't yet trust the report — or don't know it can do what they need.

This session isn't about export mechanics — it's about the conversation. We'll look at real-world use cases where business users default to exporting (ad hoc slicing, building their own summaries, sharing with people outside the report's audience, "just double-checking the numbers") and how to identify why each one happens. From there, we'll cover practical ways to communicate the benefits of staying in Power BI — real-time data, single source of truth, reduced version-control risk, faster iteration — in language that resonates with business users, not just BI teams. We'll also be honest about where Excel exports are genuinely still the right tool, and how acknowledging that builds more trust than resisting it outright.
What attendees will learn:

Common business-user use cases behind export requests, and the underlying need each one reflects
How to have a productive conversation with stakeholders about why they export, before offering a Power BI alternative
Framing the benefits of staying in-report in business terms (trust, speed, accuracy) rather than technical terms
Building report features that directly replace the reasons people export (bookmarks, what-if parameters, personalized views, subscriptions)
Knowing when an export genuinely is the right answer, and how to say so without undermining your governance message
Why this session matters: Most Power BI content focuses on building better reports. This one focuses on the harder, less-discussed skill of getting business users to actually trust and adopt them — a challenge every BI team faces, especially in high-pressure, Excel-native industries like finance.