Being forced to use a gateway for Onedrive for business

[DaveConnors]

Why am I forced to use a gateway if using data from an excel file stored on onedrive for business? How is that NOT a cloud source?

I have a report, and when I share it to the service I can't refresh it because of a gateway issue. I recently moved my SQL from VM to Azure PaaS so deleted my gateway and it was working fine without for a while so I was baffled.

Turns out I added some additional data from an excel on OneDrive for Business, and now it demands a gateway again. Why on earth would it do that, since it's still a cloud-based dataset with nothing on-premise?

[Burningsuit · Accepted solution]

Hi @DaveConnors 

It's probable that you've connected to the Excel file that has been synchronised from OneDrive onto your hard disk. Because its a synchronized copy of your OneDrive file on your local hard disk Power BI needs a Gateway to access the local file.

You need to use the web connector to connect to the Excel file in OneDrive in the Cloud, see..

Use OneDrive for Business links in Power BI Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

Briefly, you get the URL of the Excel file in the OneDrive Cloud, then connect to that with the web connector. Because it's a cloud to cloud connection in Power BI you won't need a Gateway.

Hope this helps

Stuart

[DaveConnors]

@Burningsuit thank you!! That's worked. I was sure there must be a way, I was looking for a specific onedrive connector, not the web one.

Thank you so much, that's done the job a treat. Can't tell you how frustrated I was so I really appreciate that!