It's been almost 2 months since the release of Automatic Page Refresh (APR) and as we work really hard to improve this new real-time capability in Power BI, we would love to hear your feedback and opinions to help us decide what comes next and how to improve this functionality in general. Reply to this post letting us know what you think so we can continue to work on improving real-time capabilities in Power BI. More APR info: Documentation Announcement Blog Post

One thing that really frustrates me about Power BI features and their release articles is that the authors seldom include the caveat of "for Premium only" when it so applies. Would it have been that difficult to name the the subtitle in the blog article to "Automatic page refresh for DirectQuery details (preview, Premium only)"? One has to read the article so see the words, "... enabled in your premium capacity by the admin ...". And that is the ONLY mention of "premium" in that section. Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great feature. I just wish I knew up front that it didn't apply to me before I start digging into its capabilities (like I did with Paginated Reports 😞 ).

We have been asking for something like this for a few years, so glad that it is finally available to us. But - the happiness had a short duration. We went with Power BI over competitors due to the flexibility and ease of setting up displays for our business that would allow a separation between IT and the super users at the facilities = IT provides the database access and views and the super users develop and maintain their visual displays themselves. This worked great when we updated the Power BI desktop, enabled the APR feature, updated the displays. We have an on prem gateway so published our changes there - only to find that the refresh was not happening on our display boards. We have mostly basic users and a few pro licenses for those who maintain the displays. I assume that the issue is due to not having a premium capacity - so even though we want to refesh the displays once a minute or so (like an airport status display), they only refresh every 15 minutes once published. Would be useful if the non-premium on prem gateway could refresh more often than 15 minutes - a minute would be best for us - don't have to go down to the second. Our directquery access to the database is a second or so due to a small set size, so the 15 minute limit isn't avoiding any capacity/workload issues. The price increase to premium makes Power BI a more expensive product than many competitors that provide near real time refreshes.

In theory this is a great new feature but its use is limited as the Power BI service limits the number of refreshes and it is only available in Direct Query mode. I would like the feature to be enabled for Import mode even if the requency is every half an hour. The Imported dataset can be updated via a schedule but the report is not automatically refreshed which appears to be a flaw.

My understanding is that it will work without Premium but obviously the number of refreshes are higher.

I am having trouble getting the automatic page refresh. Can someone please tell me if I am doing something wrong here?I have the preview feature on however, it does not show up under the formatting icon. We do have premium.

Share your thoughts on Automatic Page Refresh aka APR (Preview feature)

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