I have power bi configured on Azure, a dataset reading its data from excel document which is updated on daily basis.
The refresh is done manually through powerbi desktop. After I click on refresh, my reports and dashboards are reading updated figures, I open it from power bi desktop; however if I open it from any browser, data is not updated, I will have to publish my power bi reports and dashboards from power bi desktop publish button in order to see my data updated from browser.
Power BI desktop is the development tool for powerbi.com, after you have published it to powerbi.com, it has no relation with your offline .pbix file. Publishing it again (with the same name), will overwrite the file with it's data.
So a local refresh in power bi desktop has no influence on the file in powerbi.com
If you want that powerbi.com can read data from your excel file (on Premise), you'll have to setup a powerbi gateway. More information on following link: Power BI gateway personal mode
On-premises data sources
A personal gateway is required in order to refresh datasets that get data from a supported on-premises data source in your organization.
With a gateway, REFRESH NOW and SCHEDULE REFRESH are supported for datasets uploaded from:
Microsoft Excel 2013 (or later) workbooks where Power Query or Power Pivot is used to connect to and query data from a supported on-premises data source. All on-premises data sources shown in Get External Data in Power Query or Power Pivot support refresh except for Hadoop file (HDFS) and Microsoft Exchange.
