Editing power BI Service, but also having a pbix file

[DebbieE]

can someone help me understand something thats been bugging me for a while. I create all my reports in Power BI Desktop. Something Im doing has told me to add a visual in the Service in edit mode

Ive never really understood Edit mode for reports in the Service. Surely when you go back to you report in desktop and republish your pbix file. Anything thats been updated in Service will get overwritten by the Pbix file?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@DebbieE You are correct, the PBIX will certainly overwrite anything deployed to the Service. Building reports in the Service is actually the only way some reports can be built. (Streaming data, or capturing and staging some of that streaming data allows you to build reports only in the Service because the capability isn't in the PBIX to hook up to that stream.

I never thought I'd be doing modifications in the Service either, but recently I have several reports that are extremely large and take a long time to process. These are client facing, so if there is a "hot-fix" that I need to tweak something in the report, I'll just make the modification in the Service so the change happens immediately. This allows me to leave the source databases alone (not run another refresh) and make a quick fix. Later on, I'll download the PBIX and replace my local version.