Relation between OneDrive Excel sheet with online PowerBI

[Leozin28]

Hey gurus, hope u all are doing fine!

So, I am basically new to PowerBI and Fabric, however I´ve seen this enough to say that it might change my work from now on.

Here´s the deal. I´ve created a Database (as an Excel Sheet) and posted on OneDrive Business, owned by my company. Did the same thing to a PowerBI dashboard using this Excel Sheet as its data provider (at PowerBI Desktop) and also uploaded to OneDrive Business. Everything is working just great! No problems at all.

My doubt: Is there a way to use this PowerBI ONLINE (app.powerbi) with the Excel on OneDrive as its database? For example, if I changed one item on the sheet (that is uploaded to OneDrive, so it is cloud saved), would that change the PowerBI ONLINE by just refreshing? 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @Leozin28 ,

Based on the information you provided. One thing to note for onedrive refresh: 

• Unlike a semantic model refresh during which Power BI imports data from a data source into a semantic model, OneDrive refresh synchronizes semantic models and reports with their source files. By default, Power BI checks about every hour if a semantic model connected to a file on OneDrive or SharePoint Online requires synchronization.
• Power BI performs refresh based on an item ID in OneDrive, so be thoughtful when considering updates versus replacement. When you set a OneDrive file as the data source, Power BI references the item ID of the file when it performs the refresh. Consider the following scenario: you have a master file A and a production copy of that file B, and you configure OneDrive refresh for file B. If you then copy file A over file B, the copy operation deletes the old file B and creates a new file B with a different item ID, which breaks OneDrive refresh. To avoid that situation, you can instead upload and replace file B, which keeps its same item ID.

Fore more detail, you can refer to below document:

Refresh a semantic model from OneDrive or SharePoint Online - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Best Regards,
Adamk Kong

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly

[Leozin28]

Hey Kong,

Thank u for ur help. I had no idea about those facts and will cooperate with PowerBi from now on, to be as useful and effecient as it can.

I will try to upload and replace the file you suggested to see if it will work after it. However, I´ve just discovered that I dont´t have a gateway for my data. Therefore, the PowerBi service app it´s not fully working. If I could have a guess, I´d say this is one of the main cause for errors as well.

[Leozin28]

I come w both good and bad news.

I did relate both PowerBIs, the one that is in my OneDrive and the online app.powerbi version, so my PowerBI is being "fed" by the Excel sheet.

Yet, I still can´t work why it´s not changing stuff. Every time I change something in that sheet, it does change OneDrive PowerBI after it´s open, while the online just shows an error when trying to refresh it.

Has anyone seen that and knows to fix it?