Import Excel Workbook and Refresh It

[Keith3618]

Hello everyone!

In an Excel sheet, I have a connection where a query is pulling in data from our SQL Server. When I loaded the data into the Excel sheet, I added it to the Data Model.

I saved this Excel sheet on a Network drive and uploaded it to our Power BI Report Server. It was placed under the "Excel Workbooks" header. I clicked on the elipse, then hit "Manage". Here there is no option to set up a scheduled refresh.

I am trying to "host" an excel sheet on our Report Server and have the underlying SQL code run daily via a scheduled refresh. Is this possible? If so, how do I set it up? 

Thank you all for the help!

[RobThrive]

How would PowerBI tell the excel file to connect to the SQL server and exec the command and pull the data back...

Why are you not just putting the SQL directly into PowerBI. If you can run it from Excel, you can run it from PowerBI I would have thought. Much better performance, and much better governance and easier to maintain, easier to track and fix problems.

[d_gosbell]

Yes, if you just want to show the result of a SQL query you would probably be better off to just build a paginated report using report builder. If the query is very expensive and you only want to run it once a day you could setup a caching policy. Paginated reports can also export to Excel if that is where your users want to see the data.