Power BI Desktop and On-Premise Gateway

[ablcstf]

I tried to find a solution for this but failed, so...

I can't understand this one thing. I need help.

In Power BI Service, I've successfully set up an On-Premise Gateway (the Enterprise-thing, not the Personal thingie) connection and with that, a Data Source connection. There's an Excel (.xlsx) file which is updated daily at 9:00, and the Data Source connection is for it. The gateway sits on a virtual machine and the Excel file is in there too. There is no way to access this Excel file other than logging in to the machine with Remote Desktop Connection and looking at it with own eyes. No webdavs, no file sharings, no FTPs. Nothing.

What I don't understand is, while sitting at my home office, 20 kilometers away from the server running the virtual machine I mentioned earlier: How would I now make a report in Power BI Desktop, so that when I eventually publish it to Power BI Service, it would use the gateway I just mentioned to get the data from the Excel file? In other words, how can I point to the Excel file in Power BI Desktop if that file isn't accessible thru anything else than the gateway? There's no gateway-option in Get Data-dialog.

The Personal Gateway isn't an option either, as I've read that reports and dashboards relying on such Data Source can't be shared with other workspaces.

Offtopic, so don't dwell on this: The reason I'm asking this before trying, is that I just burned a lot of work hours (=money) for trial'n'erroring myself to the conclusion that no, slinging the Excel file to a Sharepoint Online folder and using it as a periodically refreshed data source doesn't work, as the Scheduled Refresh spills the OAuth credentials somewhere and then tries to bang its head with Anonymous login, as soon as you watch elsewhere, or in about an hour.

[ablcstf · Accepted solution]

OK so I figured it out now.

Although it's nice to solve the problem, the solution itself is lame and disappointing.

So, the same exact virtual machine where the data source file (that excel file) is stored and the on-premise gateway software is installed...

I had to take an RDP connection to it, download and install Power BI Desktop to it, open my pbix file, and set the local filepath (c:\...) of the data source as the source of the query. After publishing the pbix to PBI Service, I find out that tadaa! finally the dataset can be scheduled to refresh through the gateway. So no more hassle with Sharepoint Online and the OAuth problem.