Forum Discussion
Scheduling Excel Workbook Connection (Dataflow) Refresh
Hi florianh,
I would like to apologize for my earlier response and the delay in addressing your concerns. I now understand that my previous reply did not fully address your issues. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
After thoroughly reviewing your query and the Microsoft documentation provided, it is clear that Power Automate does not fully support refreshing Excel workbook connections when the workbook is stored online. This presents a significant limitation for your needs. My previous recommendation to use Power Automate was not suitable given these constraints.
- According to Microsoft, Power Automate is unable to refresh most Excel data connections when the workbook is stored on SharePoint or OneDrive.
- Power Query is not supported in Excel Online, which restricts your capability to execute transformations and refresh data within the cloud environment.
- The current viable solutions include utilizing Power Automate Desktop (which necessitates a running computer) or transferring your data transformations and refreshes to Power BI and employing the “Analyze in Excel” feature.
Please provide your valuable suggestions in the Ideas Forum so Microsoft can consider them for future releases.
If this post helps you, please mark it as the solution and give a kudos so that other members of the community can easily find it helpful.
Thank you for being a part of the Fabric Community.
Hi, thanks for your quick reply. I do not know why so many people talking about Power Automate, it is not possible to have Excel connections refreshed with it. Here the link by MS explaining that limitation:
Refresh not fully supported in Power Automate
Office Scripts can't refresh most data when run in Power Automate. Most refresh methods, such as PivotTable.refresh, do nothing when called in a flow. Workbook.refreshAllDataConnections only refreshes when PowerBI is the source. Additionally, Power Automate doesn't trigger a data refresh for formulas that use workbook links.
also tried it on my own, it does not work.
Leverage Power BI Service
this will only refresh the dataflow but not the workbook!
It's because there's two versions of Power Automate, cloud and desktop. Power Automate desktop will physically control your computer and can do mouse clicks, so it can actually handle it via literally clicking the refresh button. It doesn't meet the requirement of "doesn't require my computer to be on all the time" though.