How to Automatically refresh report in power bi dashboard and then "share" or "publish"?

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

My boss, the CEO, has a power bi report, which connects to on premises (in house, behind the firewall) ERP (NAV 2017) as data source, every day she needs to share that report to other people: directors, sales team etc. She does not want to generate PDF and send to everyone via email every day, she wants everything to be in somewhere so everyone who needs to see the report can just go and visit the report. Now she is asking me if I can find a way to achieve that.

Both she and I have the pro license. but I dont want to use the pro license and the gateway because it is so unstable, refreshes fail all the time, and I like to have solutions that can run itself when the computer is shut off.

One raw idea i have is to, I dont know whether it is feasible actually, use power automate to generate a pdf everyday. and then put it into somewhere in the cloud like SharePoint? 

I know this maybe difficult, thank you all in advance.

Josh

[v-yuaj-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Please refer to this link:

Power BI Report Builder - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

A quick look at the new Power BI Report Builder - YouTube

The above is a brief introduction about Power BI Report Builder. If your report content is not a lot, I think it should be enough to use Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service to create a report and set a scheduled refresh.

Hope that's what you were looking for.

Best Regards,

Yuna

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[mahoneypat]

Yes.  You can set up scheduled refresh on the dataset using a gateway, and then set up a subscription on the report to auto generate emails on a schedule.  You can do so with even more flexibility with Power BI Report Builder and paginated reports.

Pat

[Anonymous]

thank you sir! im new to power bi, can I ask what is "ower BI Report Builder and paginated reports", can you point me to some resources?

[mahoneypat]

Since your datasource is on prem, you will need the gateway.  If you can set it up so a csv/excel or other format is auto emailed to you everyday from the datasource, then you can set up a flow to get the email attachment, save it on OneDrive/SharePoint and then trigger refresh of your dataset (using SharePoint file as the source).

Pat

[Anonymous]

Hi Sir,

Is it possible to autorefresh using the gateway then send a pdf to somewhere or published the refreshed report to web?

[themistoklis]

@Anonymous 

Yes you can make the report public and share the URL to the relevant people. See link below:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/service-publish-to-web

[Anonymous]

Hi Sir, does the gateway will work when my computer is shut down? I am working from home, usually I use vpn to connect to the on premise ERP. I guess i will have to keep this computer on and connect to VPN all the time?

[themistoklis]

@Anonymous 

The machine where the gateway is installed must be turned on during the scheduled refresh.

So either install the gateway in a VM, a server or keep your PC turned on