Refresh Power BI service using on premise Excel data sources

[Anonymous]

Hi All, I searched community posts and cannot find answer to my particular case: It should be simple: I published my desktop power bi file to the service and then Shared with employees in my organization using their emails.  As they used the power bi it was noticed that error was in the data (A instead of B text).  So, I changed the data in my (1 of 4) excel files and now want to Refresh the service version. I can't figure how to do that; it won't refresh when I click Refresh.  I've read MS articles yesterday on ways to refresh and thought I had it with on-premise (personal) but further reading says I must be using SQL database as my source.  Can anyone help me get this service version refreshed.   Thanks for any help!!  Jeff

[jeffshieldsdev · Accepted solution]

You need to install an On-Premise Data Gateway for datasets in service to reach on-Prem data sources. The gateway computer must be online and connected to the network for refresh to work. The data source must be added as data source in the gateway.

Another option is to put the excel file in SharePoint/OneDrive. Get a share url to the file and switch your dataset to use the Web connector and paste in the url (it has to be cleansed--remove something like x:/r/ from the url after the site root, and strip trailing characters so it ends with the file extension). You can also use the SharePoint Folder connector and the site root url and navigate/drill into to the file.