Power BI Beginner Level: 27 - Setting Up Online Scheduled Refresh

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Short summary: You can set up scheduled refresh on your published report data on app.powerbi.com to make sure that your users see fresh data in your report. No more sending updates by email, the report link stays the same and the refreshes happen automatically once set up. You can set up to eight refreshes per day with a Pro license or up to 48 refreshes per day with a Premium license.

Before we share the report, let us set up scheduled refresh. As we established in the previous article, when you publish your Power BI report from Power BI Desktop to app.powerbi.com, the published result is split into a dataset with just the data and a report with just the report which uses the dataset.

Manual Refresh in Power BI Desktop

As a first validation of course, you should make sure that you can refresh your report in Power BI Desktop as it is easier to troubleshoot issues there. So open the Power BI report file and click Refresh.

You will be asked for credentials and the required credentials depend on the data sources which you are using. In order for you to be able to refresh my report file, I am hosting all Excel sample files in a public repository on GitHub. In that case, use anonymous access (1), set the level to apply these settings to just my repository power-bi-series (2), and then click connect. This way, whenever data is loaded from that repository, anonymous access is used.

Other authentication methods which you are likely to encounter as a beginner user are Basic for username and password authentication and Organizational account for logging into Microsoft services and other services via Single-Sign On (SSO). The latter would open a browser page for logging in.

Scheduled Refresh Online

Navigate to app.powerbi.com, then to you workspace, however over the Dataset with your mouse, and click the Schedule refresh icon. There, you need to enter your credentials again for each data source, as app.powerbi.com does not know the credentials which you used in Power BI Desktop. Under Data source credentials, click Edit credentials on each data source.

As established earlier, for all files hosted on my public GitHub repository select anonymous access.

Privacy level setting by the way is a way of segregating confidential data sources and public data sources (like weather information). I don't find them useful, I just consider all data to be confidential, so I don't use Privacy level. Instead I recommend you to follow my security advice in the next article about report sharing and basic security.

Repeat the process of editing credentials until all warning icons at the data source credentials are gone. Note that if you have even one data source that app.powerbi.com cannot access or you haven't provided credentials for, you cannot use scheduled refresh. When you add more data sources later on and publish the report again, you need to edit the credentials for the new data sources here, otherwise schedules refresh will not work.

Now that you have entered all credentials, you can use scheduled refresh. Go to the Refresh section, turn it on (1), set the refresh frequency (2), and click Apply (3). You can also set up refresh failure notifications by email which is quite useful. It is enabled by default for the dataset owner, which is you in this case. Regarding the refresh frequency (2), if you select Daily and leave it at that, the refresh happens around midnight of the selected time zone.

You can add more times by clicking "Add another time", which can only be at full hours or half hours, e.g. 8:00AM, 8:30AM, 9:AM, 9:30AM, etc. With a Pro license, you can set up to 8 refreshes per day, whereas with a Premium license, you can set up to 48 refreshes per day. In case of Premium, the workspace needs to be set as Premium workspace and all report users need to have Premium as well. Refer to my article on Power BI pricing for more information on Pro vs Premium.

Congratulations, now your report users automatically get up-to-date data without you having to do anything further. Just make sure that the structure (not the content) of your data sources stays the same in order to avoid import failures. In case of refresh failure, you will get an email notification, usually with a good error description.

General Considerations for Data Sources

Because scheduled refresh is such an important topic, let's talk about general considerations so you don't run into trouble. As noted before, all data sources need credentials entered on app.powerbi.com, regardless of whether you already entered them in Power BI Desktop. But more importantly, app.powerbi.com can only connect to data sources which it can reach over the internet*. Therefore, it can happen that refresh works on Power BI Desktop but not on app.powerbi.com!

Data sources which app.powerbi.com can access:

• Databases in the web or on cloud services, especially Azure
• Microsoft OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint
• Files hosted online, e.g. on GitHub
• Web API

Data sources which app.powerbi.com cannot access*:

• Files or databases on your or others' local computers
• Files or databases on your or others' local networks
• Anything that requires a VPN connection

*You can still make it work by installing and setting up a Data Gateway, which is a program that you can install on a machine with access to the data source and which forwards the data to app.powerbi.com. However this is quite advanced and inconvenient.

In one of the next articles, I will show you how to effectively connect to files on your local computer by using OneDrive.

Thanks for staying with me on this important topic, and see you in the next article about finally sharing the report with other users.

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Next article:?Report Sharing and Basic Security