You could see the early signs here and here. Back in September 2019, the Facebook connector in Power BI and Excel started to return errors when used to import Facebook pages.
DataSource.Error: Facebook: (#10) To use ‘Page Public Content Access’, your use of this endpoint must be reviewed and approved by Facebook.
While the problem was not technical and required an approval process between Facebook and Microsoft, I was optimistic (for a while) that this issue will be resolved. Today I received this email from Office365 Message Center (Sent to O365 administrators. You might get it as well). The connector will be retired in Excel beginning April 1, 2020.
Here is the full message from Microsoft Office365 Message Center:
| We will be retiring the Facebook Get & Transform (Power Query) data connector feature from Excel beginning April 1, 2020. [How does this affect me?] If your tenant has any existing Get & Transform (Power Query) queries that pull data from Facebook, please continue to read this message. If this doesn’t apply to you, you may dismiss this message. Import and refresh data from Facebook in Excel will be retired starting April 1, 2020. After that date, the Facebook connector will no longer be available, and any user who tries to connect to Facebook will receive an error message. [What do I need to do to prepare for this change?] We recommend removing any existing Get & Transform (Power Query) queries that pull data from Facebook. Inform your help-desk and update documentation as appropriate. |
Will it affect Power BI?
We will need to wait for an update from the Power BI team. But you can suspect that this issue is not going to be resolved in Power BI since the connector is being retired in Excel. You are probably already impacted by this issue since September 2019, but otherwise, you probably wouldn’t care much.
I will keep you updated when I hear anything new. If you are going to read my book, you will not be able to follow Chapter 13 with Excel after April 2020. I am terribly sorry. Just skip that chapter 🙁
If you use Power BI, you can still follow some of the exercises in Chapter 13 (read details here), but I wouldn’t bet that these exercises will be relevant much longer.
Is it the right time to start drafting the 2nd edition of my book? What do you think?
