Refreshing Excel Workbook data from on prem data sources

There was a significant on-prem data refresh release today. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/07/07/refresh-for-on-premises-sources-is-here.aspx 

Starting today, in Power BI you can refresh datasets connecting to your on-premises sources such as SQL Server. Any workbook created using Power BI Designer, Power Query or Power Pivot are supported. For these datasets the Power BI Personal Gateway enables automated refreshes against on-premises data sources in your organization, all via a single gateway you can install directly on your desktop machine.

All common data sources are supported:

• SQL Server
• Oracle
• Teradata
• IBM DB2
• PostgreSQL
• Sybase
• MySQL
• SharePoint List (on-premises)
• File (CSV, XML, Text, Excel, Access)
• On-premises SQL Server Analysis Services models (uploaded data; not live connections)
• Folder
• Custom SQL/native SQL

In addition to on-premises sources refresh, we have enabled two new features for refresh from cloud or on-premises:

1. More frequent refreshes – you can now set up a schedule to refresh more than once a day
2. Refresh failure notification/history – you can be notified via email when a refresh fails and also find detailed information in the service for the cause of the failure. You can also view your refresh history and see any failures/successes.

In this blog post, we’ll introduce these new features.

In order to refresh a dataset connecting to an on-premises data source you need to install and configure the Power BI Personal Gateway.

More information is available on the Power BI blog.