Power BI Service Shared File Refresh

[alhormaza]

Hi all,

I have shared a Power BI report that I created on my local drive using Power BI Desktop with some members on my team. If my colleagues want to refresh that shared report to get the latest data (and I'm out of the office), how would they need to do that? Do I always have to refresh my local copy first, publish it and then they can manually refresh it? Or is there a way for that to happen automatically?

Thank you,

Alex

[v-frfei-msft]

Hi @alhormaza,

What is your data source? Here I suggest you to use gateway to configure shcedule refresh insteading of refresh the report in desktop and publish it again and again.

After you install the gatewat and configure correctly, then you can add users to the data source. Then they can refresh the dataset in service by themselves by clicking the Refresh now button.

For more details, please check the online document. If any other question, feel free to let me know please.

Regards,

Frank

[alhormaza]

Hi Frank,

Thank you for your reply and your proposed solution! I actually went ahead and created a Power BI Gateway but still haven't fully finished the process though I believe this might be the answer I was looking for.

I do want to explain a little bit more what we are trying to do so I'm sure your suggestion would fit our needs.

A peer from my team created a Report in Power BI desktop which he needs to refresh once a month. The data sources for this report are a series of excel files that he keeps in a folder on our organization's SharePoint. We recently signed up for the Pro License so this report is now available online for all our team in Power BI Service.

We are looking for a way to refresh this report (it can be manually or automatically) even if our peer is out of the office. Since the original report that was created in Power BI Desktop is on his PC we were thinking to move it to our SharePoint. But we aren't sure if it can get refreshed automatically or manually (by any of us) when any of the excel files get updated. Also, we would like to be able to use the "Edit Query" function from Power BI Service without the need to go to the original report.

Does this make sense?

Thanks,

Alex