Need help: Refreshing PBI Reports

[Moke]

Hi everyone, 

I have a problem refreshing reports in PBI Service. Evrything I do looks manual and wanted to check if what I have been doing is right or not. Also, if you provide me possible alternatives, it would be great. 

So, I have a report that should be refreshed weekly. Mostly, I use Excel data source that should be always exported from a different cloud environment, but doesn't have a connector to PBI. I developed the Power BI report and published it in to Service. When I want to refresh it once in a week, I follow the following steps. 

1. Export the data in to Excel from the cloud source,

2. Save it to OneDrive,

3. Open Query Editor and replace the file path for the new Excel data. 

4. Save and Publish it Power BI Service replacing the previous report.

From the service version, I see that my data is refreshed and can see KPIs changed. However, I want to schedule refresh it by installing gateway connection, but the gateway installation failed. The error just shows it failed. My guess is because I don't have the Admin status. As a result, I am currently using the above manual steps to refreh my report weekly. Please let me know if I am doing right, missing anything important step, together with your best practices. 

Thanks

[v-binbinyu-msft]

Hi @Moke ,

Please try to use OneDrive refresh:

1. Export the data in to Excel from the cloud source

2. Create a report with the data in Power BI Desktop and save it as .pbix file

3. Upload .pbix file to OneDrive for Business

4. In Power BI Service Portal, publish a report by get this .pbix file

5. Export the new data in to Excel from the cloud source

6. Open the .pbix file in Power BI Desktop and change the datasource path, then save it and upload to OneDrive for Business(replace the older .pbix file)

Note: Power BI will check every hour to see if the .pbix file has changed, and will automatically refresh the dataset if it has.

For more details, you can read related document: Data refresh in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Best regards,
Community Support Team_Binbin Yu
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