Gateway not connecting to excel files

[EvanBeiser]

Hello all,

I am having some trouble with gateways, previously everything worked fine but I had to uninstall and reinstall my personal gateway when it unexpectedly quit working.  My pbix files are being imported from OneDrive for Business and most of my data sources are coming from Oracle or an ODBC source (trying to make my dashboard as "live" as possible as most of my sources are updated every day).

My issue now is that my some of my excel files that are needed to build out my reports are causing my entire pbix files to not refresh online. Under data source credentials in settings, I get this error when I try to edit credentials "Failed to update data source credentials: We are unable to connect to the data source. Please ensure that data source is accessible.Show details" 

These files are saved directly on my desktop so I'm not sure why it's not able to connect. Is there a possible work around to make things more reliable? I have tried saving these files to my OneDrive, but cannot import them to my PBIX files, I think because of admin restrictions on my computer.  I guess the bottom line is what is the simplest and most reliable ways people have set up their dashboards and data files so that datasets can be updated on a regular basis?  Hopefully this isn't too much of dramatic personal issue, but any help would be appreciated. 

Thanks, 

Evan 

[ankitpatira]

@EvanBeiser do you absolutely need power bi desktop to connect to downloaded onedrive files and refresh it that way ? I would suggest if you're not using power bi desktop to do data transformations heavily (and if needed you are able to do that at the source level) then skip the steps of downloaded one drive excel files locally -> power bi desktop -> gateway. You can connect to onedrive personal or business straight from power bi service and build your reports and dashboards there. Data will also be refreshed automatically per hour. 

You can click on Get Data -> Files in power bi service and connect to onedrive files. There is a small workaround you need to do before you can use excel file in power bi and refer to this article to get that done.

To me this would be the simplest approach as you'r taking away layers of local excel files -> pbi desktop and gateway.

[kcarrillo]

I am having the exact same issue. I am doing heavy data transformations. How do you get around this? My data updates throughout the day. I want a schedule to update every hour. Is this not possible today?