Onedrive for Business Has Old Data

Hi dsullivan,

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I connected to a onedrive excel file using the PBI service (that I had shared with a coworker) and created a small dashboard.  My understanding is that (1) as long as the data connection is through Onedrive it will update automatically even with the Power BI basic service?  

 

It was working fine, and would update pretty quickly whenever we made a change to the data.  After using it for a week, I needed to make some "schema" changes to the excel file, adding a couple columns.  Of course that completely broke the report.  I rebuilt it in the service from scratch, but now it never updates.  After changing a field value from blank to "test 2" in the excel, it still shows blank.  I even removed the data source from powerbi and rebuilt it (a day later) and it is still showing the old data with the blank instead of the "test 2".  It is like somehow that datasource is staying in power bi (and is frozen) even when I delete it.  

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Based on my test, if we connect to the OneDrive for Business Excel file via "Connect, Manage, and View Excel in Power BI" and pin the table to a dashboard, after we modify the Excel field value, the update will display in the report and dashboard after refresh. To make the dashboard tile update the value, you can click Refresh dashboard tiles option to refresh now.

Generally, importing files from OneDrive, or SharePoint Online, is a great way to make sure the work you’re doing in Excel stays in-sync with the Power BI service. You can take a look at this article: Refresh a dataset created from an Excel workbook on OneDrive, or SharePoint Online.

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Can you build a dashboard with Power BI Desktop using a onedrive excel file and when you publish have it connect directly to the onedrive file and update automatically?  If so how?  To me it seems that the only way to get it to update is to open up Power BI desktop and "publish".  Seems hard to believe but observing it that is what it looks like to me.

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We can get data from OneDrive for Business Excel file via web data source ( Use OneDrive for Business links in Power BI Desktop),

and create a report in Power BI Desktop. Then publish the report to Power BI Service, setup the schedule refresh for the dataset. It

will use information in the dataset to connect directly to the data sources to query for updated data it then loads into the dataset. See: Refresh a dataset created from a Power BI Desktop file on a local drive.

Is there really no way to control the formatting of numbers in Power BI Service?  We have a $ column, and in excel it is formatted $###,###.  In Power BI it is formatting ######.  

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Based on my test, if we set the Number Format as Currency with $, the report will display the same values as in Excel.

In your scenario, please double check column format like us.

Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu