Publishing to PBI Service with overwrite not working but it says Success?

[DamienDevaney]

Hi all,

I'm looking at Power BI Desktop at a report that pulls in sales data from an odata source. There is also a dimension table drawn from an Excel file so for customer "X" I can see salesperson "A". The Excel file has been updated to show salesperson "B". The report has been refreshed and saved and all looks fine in Power BI desktop.

I click Publish and it says "This semantic model already exists do you want to Replace" and I say Yes. Success message flashes up.

Now when I look at the report in the service all the sales data is up to date but it is still saying customer X has salesperson A. 

In the service I can see the model's refresh in Refresh History. I have opened the model and clicked "Explore this data" and the semantic model defintely thinks that customer X has salesperson A. It seems this particualrly table has not updated, even though it says it has.

Is there any way I can force a refresh without publishing it with a different name? I have many dashboards coming off of this report so I do not want to recreate everything.

[v-yilong-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @DamienDevaney ,

I think you can manually refresh the dataset from the Power BI service. This can be done by navigating to the dataset in the service, clicking the ellipsis (...) and selecting Refresh Now.

To refresh a dataset without granting users access to the Power BI service, you can use Power Automate to trigger the refresh.

If you are using import mode for tables, consider switching to DirectQuery mode. This will allow the report to reflect changes in the data source in real time. You can look at this document: Data refresh in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Best Regards

Yilong Zhou

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

[DamienDevaney]

Just to add. I have tried publishing the report with a different name and as I suspected it worked fine (showing customer X with salesperson B).

So there is definitley a problem here with overwriting.