The quickest path to an automated Power BI pipeline isn't a clever VBA workaround, it's a direct approach that leverages the tools you already have. You've done the hard part: Power Automate is reliably dropping CSV files into SharePoint. Now you're worried about sinking hours into a dead end, and that caution is exactly right. The VBA-and-Power-Automate loop you've seen discussed is a brittle workaround that introduces a point of failure every time Excel's COM object doesn't close cleanly or a security update breaks the macro. It works until it doesn't, and when it breaks, you lose time diagnosing a script instead of analyzing your data. This frustration echoes what we see across the community, where Excel users share frustrations over data quirks and constant update fatigue and spend more time wrestling with refresh logic than building dashboards.
Your Power BI subscription already gives you a cleaner path. With Power BI Premium and the dataset hosted in the service, you can schedule a refresh directly, no Excel middleman required. Set your Power Query to combine files from the SharePoint folder, publish the dataset, and configure a scheduled refresh in the dataset settings. You can run it as often as every thirty minutes. If you need a trigger-based refresh when a new CSV lands, Power Automate can call the Power BI REST API to refresh the dataset on file creation. That's two services you already own, talking to each other without a fragile Excel workbook acting as a hinge. It's the difference between building a bridge and balancing on a plank, and it avoids the kind of performance drag that happens when nested formulas slow your data to a crawl.
The real opportunity here isn't just automation, it's reclaiming your attention from maintenance overhead. Every hour you spend coding VBA workarounds or troubleshooting refresh failures is an hour you aren't exploring what the data actually says. Your pipeline goal is modest: combine CSVs, refresh on a schedule or trigger, keep the dashboard live. That's a solved problem within Power BI's native capabilities. The Premium Copilot you mentioned can even help you shape those queries faster, turning the repetitive task of file combining into a conversation about what you want to measure.
The specific takeaway is this: skip the Excel-VBA detour entirely. Use Power Automate to trigger a Power BI dataset refresh via the REST API when a file lands in SharePoint. That's a few configuration steps, not a weekend of debugging. If you still want to explore the Excel route for prototyping, keep it separate from your production pipeline. Otherwise, the only dead end worth worrying about is the one that keeps you from moving to a solution that already works.