Impossible to activate refresh in Power BI Service

Hey jip34  ,

Your issue is related to how Power BI Service handles authentication and connectors when accessing Microsoft Power BI with Microsoft Azure Blob Storage.

Your observations are correct:

• Web connector + SAS URL → Works for access but not supported for scheduled refresh.
• Azure Blob Storage + OAuth2 → Allows listing containers/blobs but often fails when directly loading individual files depending on how the query is written.

Below are the practical solutions used in real implementations.

Solution 1 — Use Azure Blob Connector with Folder Navigation (Recommended)

Instead of selecting the CSV file directly, load the container first and then filter to the file.

Steps

1. In Power BI Desktop
   Get Data → Azure Blob Storage
2. Authenticate using OAuth2 (your Azure AD account).
3. Load the container table.
4. In Power Query, filter the Name column to your required CSV file.
5. Click Binary → Combine Files.

Example Power Query logic:

let
    Source = AzureStorage.Blobs("https://storageaccount.blob.core.windows.net"),
    Container = Source{[Name="nexthinkreports"]}[Data],
    FilteredFile = Table.SelectRows(Container, each [Name] = "report.csv"),
    FileContent = FilteredFile{0}[Content],
    CsvData = Csv.Document(FileContent)
in
    CsvData

This method works with OAuth2 and scheduled refresh in Power BI Service.

Best Practice Architecture

Most organizations use:

Azure Blob Storage → Power BI Dataflow → Semantic Model → Reports