We're on Dynamics 365 and still exporting to Excel every Monday — can anyone fix that?

• 01Which Dynamics 365 you run decides the extraction surface. The Dataverse-backed apps — Sales, Customer Service, Field Service — store rows in Dataverse, which can be surfaced into OneLake or read selectively over the Dataverse Web API — confirm which of those your Dynamics licensing actually grants before scoping either. Finance and Operations exposes data entities instead, and Business Central exposes its own API and OData web services. Confirm which applies before anyone estimates the work.
• 02Dynamics 365 online needs no on-premises data gateway. A gateway is needed when the Monday workbook is also fed by something behind the firewall — an on-prem SQL Server, a Dynamics AX 2012, NAV or GP database, a payroll system — and that gateway makes an outbound connection, so no inbound firewall ports are opened.
• 03Incremental refresh keys off a row-level modified timestamp — Dataverse keeps modifiedon, Finance and Operations entities carry an equivalent field — so only changed records move after the first load. The failure mode is deletes: a watermark on a modified date cannot see a hard-deleted row, so deletions need change tracking or a periodic full reconcile of key tables, or balances drift quietly over months.
• 04The spreadsheet is usually not just transport. Most weekly Dynamics workbooks contain logic that exists nowhere in Dynamics: a mapping table someone maintains by hand, excluded cost centres, a currency rate typed in each Monday, a manual accrual. Automating the export without auditing the workbook ships the old numbers with none of the adjustments, and finance will spot it in week one.
• 05Choice and option-set columns typically arrive as integer codes rather than labels; multi-currency rows carry a transaction currency and need an explicit base-currency conversion rule; Dataverse calculated and rollup fields are computed on read and may not land in the lake at all. Each is a decision for your team to make once, in the semantic model, rather than per report.
• 06Honest limit: if the Monday workbook is one person pulling one Dynamics view and sending it to four people, this is the wrong solution. An Excel refresh against the Dynamics API, or a single Power BI report with a scheduled refresh, solves that at a fraction of the cost. A governed Fabric pipeline earns its keep when several systems have to reconcile, when more than one team argues about the same number, or when the export has quietly become a month-end dependency.

For the full explainer on this topic rather than this specific question, see the detailed guide on the blog.