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LaineyJB
Advocate II
Advocate II

Connecting to PBI dataset in Excel - Refresh fails

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but hopefully someone can help. We have a dataset in a PBI Premium workspace that is used for numerous reports and Excel files. We have some large Excel files that a former coworker created using this dataset which have recently stopped refreshing. The error is as follows for each PivotTable in all of these files:

 

"A PivotTable, cube function or filter control using the connection '[Dataset name]' didn't refresh. Continue to refresh all?"

 

3 of us have tried refreshing these files and received this error, including myself, the owner of the dataset. We can create new files with a connection to the dataset and they refresh fine, but can't refresh the existing files, can't copy the existing sheets to a new file and then refresh, etc. The connection string is the same in the old files vs. new ones. We are puzzled as to why this is suddenly failing and have tried a lot of solutions to no avail. Any thoughts on why we're getting this?

 

We would ideally recreate these files as PBI reports, but currently don't have time to do this with the significant number of files that are needed on a short timeline. Any other workarounds would be helpful too.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
GilbertQ
Super User
Super User

Hi @LaineyJB 

It would appear that there must be a filter or column which has changed in the dataset which has caused the Excel to fail on refreshing.

 

Whilst it might be a bit time consuming I would work through each sheet, and drag and drop something into an existing pivot table. Possibly there might be one sheet which is causing the entire process to fail.





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3 REPLIES 3
GilbertQ
Super User
Super User

Hi @LaineyJB 

 

Thanks for letting us know!





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GilbertQ
Super User
Super User

Hi @LaineyJB 

It would appear that there must be a filter or column which has changed in the dataset which has caused the Excel to fail on refreshing.

 

Whilst it might be a bit time consuming I would work through each sheet, and drag and drop something into an existing pivot table. Possibly there might be one sheet which is causing the entire process to fail.





Did I answer your question? Mark my post as a solution!

Proud to be a Super User!







Power BI Blog

Thanks @GilbertQ - it looks like you're correct, one of the filters broke. I'm not sure why, as we haven't modified that field recently, but clearing/removing and re-adding it seems to have fixed one of the files. The coworker that handles these files will be back tomorrow so I'll wait to accept this as a solution until he has time to check the rest of them, but it seems like this was the issue. Thank you!

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