Native connections disable half the features accountants rely on — formatting breaks unpredictably on refresh, no calculated fields or items, no date-range slicers — and zero-activity months or accounts can simply disappear from a P&L (a technical quirk you shouldn’t need to understand). They also frustrate IT: every intelligence requirement becomes a change request to the data model, while Excel fires notoriously suboptimal queries making workbooks drag.

Zap Live fills the gaps in the Excel experience with stable formatting, centralized version-controlled calculations, hierarchical slicing with "all-except" and date-range functionality, while delivering superior performance to direct PivotTable connections through a purpose-built query engine optimized for financial reporting workloads.

Same formatting and governance issues as the prior answer — plus raw SQL bypasses the analytic engine, so no star-schema speed, no version-controlled metrics, and every refresh pounds the source data warehouse database (or worse the ERP source database). Zap Live queries the analytic engine, so it's fast, governed, and zero-load on SQL.

Direct-connection ERP add-ins may hit the ERP database in real time, slowing production. They also give each workbook its own formulas, meaning there's no calculation governance. Zap Live runs off a data warehouse that blends multiple sources — even multiple ERPs — pivots sub-second, and keeps one truth across Excel, Power BI, and Fabric.

Add "Zap Live" from the Microsoft Office Store, sign in with your Zap tenant, and you're live in minutes. The add-in is free, but does require a Zap Data Hub SaaS subscription. Designer users can build/refresh, Consumer users can refresh only, and any non-Zap user can open the workbook. See our pricing details here.

Zap streams only the slice you ask for, so even billion-row warehouses pivot in under a second while Excel’s 1 M-row grid never fills up. Refreshes run on the schedule you choose — and you can trigger an on-demand refresh from Excel to pull the latest ERP data whenever you need it.

Zap Live uses Microsoft 365 single sign-on, honours MFA and conditional-access policies, and never stores passwords in workbooks. All traffic is encrypted in transit and at rest, and row-level and dimensional security (available on qualifying plans) mirrors your warehouse roles. Compliance teams can tick the box — see our Cloud Security Overview.

Yes. Point a Zap Data Hub pipeline at your Zap Live workbook; the pipeline pulls the sheet back into the warehouse for centralised budgeting, planning, and commentary. You keep Excel’s full power for calculations, forecasting, spreading, allocations, and what-if modelling, while the data ends up governed alongside everything else. Deeper front-end workflow and audit tooling are planned for future releases.