Microsoft's announcement about Power Query in Excel for the web is promising, but the experience for Microsoft 365 Business Basic users is anything but clear. The user who wrote in is doing exactly what we'd advise: testing across browsers, checking for cache issues, and then turning to the community when the official documentation falls short. Their diagnosis is likely correct, and that is the real problem here. Microsoft says the full Power Query experience is available to "Business or Enterprise plans," but the term "Business plans" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Business Basic is a business plan in name, yet the Get Data button disables on click. That is not a user error. That is a licensing gate that has not been communicated with the precision that subscribers deserve.
The practical takeaway for anyone in a similar situation is to stop assuming the issue is on your end. If you have Business Basic, you are likely working with a limited version of Power Query, one that lets you view and refresh queries but not build them from scratch. The user's second question, whether a query created in desktop Excel would refresh in the web version after upload, is the more interesting one. Based on the announcement, refresh is available to all subscribers, so the query itself should work. But the ability to create or edit it in the browser will not. That means your workflow becomes a one-way street: build on the desktop, upload to the cloud, and hope you never need to tweak the logic while you are away from your local machine.
This is not about technical incompetence or a need for better shadow IT. It is about Microsoft's own messaging failing to meet the moment. When a user can see a button, click it, and have it do nothing, that is a design failure as much as a licensing one. The feature is either available to your plan or it is not. Telling users that the "full experience" is available to "Business or Enterprise plans" while leaving Business Basic out of the fine print is the kind of ambiguity that sends people to community forums in the first place.
Our advice to anyone facing this wall is to test your specific plan before building a workflow around the feature. Create a query on the desktop, upload it to your company's OneDrive or SharePoint, and see if the refresh works in the browser. If it does, you have a viable path forward, just one with limits. If it does not, you have concrete evidence to take back to your IT team, or to use in a support ticket that actually gets escalated. And to Microsoft: clarity is not a premium feature. If Business Basic users can view and refresh, say so plainly. If they cannot create queries, say that too. Users should not have to become detectives to understand what their own subscription includes.