Automatic hourly refresh of a Power BI dataset from an Excel file stored on OneDrive

2
votes

How to set up automatic hourly refresh of a Power BI dataset from an Excel file stored on OneDrive for Business? What am I doing wrong?

My set up goes the following path on the map of possible connections described by Vesa Tikkanen in the post Power BI: Why my report is not refreshing from OneDrive? Compatibility chart for sources.

enter image description here Original image comes from: https://www.qumio.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=44

Manual refresh of a dataset works correctly as shown on the picture below but hourly refresh does not even start.

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I try to set up automatic hourly refresh by choosing 1 and then 3 "Schedule refresh". I have OneDrive refresh set up for ON. It should be sufficient. Should anything else be enabled? Should "Scheduled refresh" be enabled?

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For sure I have good "Data source credentials", because manual refresh works. My PBIX file is also stored on OneDrive so it does not require "Publishing" for PBIX update.

I have sourced my Excel file just like it has been presented in this tutorial: https://youtu.be/uxMlV9KKf6E?t=315

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powerbirefreshonedrivepowerbi-datasource

1 Answers

5
votes

I try to explain the meaning of those 2 different options.

  1. Scheduled refresh is for Power BI to go to source and read new data and refresh the model with the new data.
  2. OneDrive Refresh is for automatically re-uploading the file from OneDrive to Power BI. So if you don't update the file it will upload every hour that same pbix file to service. This behaviour is meant for reports which cannot be scheduled to be auto refreshed but you manually construct new version of the report and that should be uploaded automatically to service after you updating the file in OneDrive.

I think you are trying to implement the automatic refresh. That means that you should uncheck the onedrive refresh and add scheduled refresh to report. This "Onedrive refresh" option is only visible when you originally uploaded report from OneDrive.

OneDrive Refresh is for updating the file, scheduled refresh is to collect data from source