Data Refresh on Power BI Online from Desktop Report/ SharePoint

[samanthamirae]

Hello,

I guess I'm just a little bit confused. I have created a couple reports on PBI Desktop from a SharePoint List and Excel spreadsheet from a SharePoint Folder. I published the reports to the Power BI online app and want to schedule refresh. I scheduled a refresh just to test it out and it failed.

I'm just wondering if I add something to my SharePoint List and schedule a refresh, will it not refresh on the Power BI Online app? When I manually click refresh on my PBI Desktop, the new data gets inputted, but how am I able to have the new data inputted onto the online reports? Am I missing something? 

The error message I received when I tried to schedule refresh was "Cannot connect to the mashup data source."

Thank you!

[v-juanli-msft]

Hi @samanthamirae

 a SharePoint Folder ia considered as a on-premise data source, so you need to connect it to a gateway.

Please follow the steps as the article described.

Power BI – Configuring SharePoint/Folder refreshing using On-Premise Gateway

Best regards

Maggie

[RMDNA]

@samanthamirae,

At least in answer to one of your questions: if you are refreshing the data manually in Power BI desktop, you need to republish the report to the Power BI service in order for it to reflect the new data.

[samanthamirae]

Hey,

I guess my ultimate question is do Power BI online reports schedule a refresh and pull data from the SharePoint List or the Power BI Desktop?

Because I just successfully did a scheduled refresh but it only uploaded the new data that was manually refreshed on my PBI Desktop, rather than the new data from the SharePoint List that I added

[RMDNA]

@samanthamirae,

Power BI Desktop is a design program, not a datasource - data is never pushed unless it's manually initiated by the user (barring DirectQuery).

It should be getting updated data from your SharePoint list, so I'm not sure what's wrong on that end.