PowerBI report - Automatic refresh of the DAX NOW() card

[janinw]

Hi all,

I have a PowerBI report in which contains the measure m_now = NOW() and this measure is displayed on a card in my report. This report is used as a dashboard and I would like to display the current date and time on this card. The data is imported from BigQuery.

Now, within Power BI Service I have set the Scheduled Cache Refresh for the dataset to every 15 minutes, so I would assume that the current date and time is at least updated every 15 minutes. But it is not. What am I missing here?

I do not want to depend on manual refresh as the dashboard will be displayed on a wallboard.

Any help is appreciated.

Best,

Janine

[janinw]

Hi all,

Just an update on the status quo - I tried two workarounds:

1. Set automatic page refresh in Power BI Desktop (under Preview Features, then go to Page settings - see also link further down)

2. Adding a column with the current datetime and schedule the refresh for every 15 minutes in Power BI Service

( For whoever is interested, I did it with PowerQuery M Language:

   SetNow = Table.AddColumn(Tablexxx, "now", each DateTime.LocalNow()),
   TypeNow = Table.TransformColumnTypes(SetNow, {"now", DateTime.Type})

)

However - it seems that both solutions are not solving the issue due to Power BI Service settings by the administrator (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-automatic-page-refresh) and the page is only refreshed every half an hour.

Thanks for your suggestions anyway!

[Icey]

Hi @janinw ,

One workaround:

Try to use Auto Refresh PowerBI Report to auto refresh Dashboards or Reports in Google Chrome.

Best Regards,

Icey

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[janinw]

Thanks! For now the wallboard is not live, but I will look into this once it is. Seems promising!

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

No, measures are not refreshed at data load, only on page load.

Create a column in a new table or existing table with NOW(). That will get updated at data load. Use MAX([NowColumn]) to display in card.

But, it still won't update on the page unless you refresh...