How does refresh from OneDrive work? REFRESH NOW option does nothing

[bonny666]

In PowerBI service understand that there's a scheduled refresh that takes the data from the OneDrive file.

However, for development purposes it is quite annoying, that i have to wait for it to randomly refresh.

There's a REFRESH option on top right corner and on the report dropdown options, but both of them do nothing it seems..

How can I force a refresh now?

[v-diye-msft]

Hi @bonny666 ,

Power BI connects to your workbook file on OneDrive about every hour. If any changes are found, your dataset, reports, and dashboards are automatically updated in Power BI. Just like if you saved your workbook to a local drive, you can also use Publish to update your dataset and reports in Power BI immediately; otherwise Power BI will automatically synchronize, usually within an hour.

If you'd like to refresh the report, you need run the on-demand refresh on dataset, then refresh the report, coz the report is always synced with dataset. 

More details please refer to the official document: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/refresh-data#onedrive-refresh

[bonny666]

Hello,

Maybe it wasn't clear, but I was talking about PowerBI service.

There's no publish option there, it seems like it's refreshing every hour, but if I want on demand I don't see such an option.. I keep clicking REFRESH and sometimes nothing happens and something it does

[v-diye-msft]

Hi @bonny666 ,

On demand refresh in service is different with that in desktop. Here you can see the difference between the "Refresh" button in Power BI Desktop and "Refresh" for Power BI Service.