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dimazaid's avatar
dimazaid
Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
9 years ago

Updates to the Web connector

We are currently working on improving the refresh of cloud based data sources. As part of this, one of the changes we have made recently is that new datasets that leverage import from Web pages will ...
Announcement
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matmoore's avatar
matmoore
Frequent Visitor
9 years ago

This is terrible news! I've developed Power BI reports that are customer facing, which use data from a web page source. Suddenly without notice, Microsoft pull this feature. This is the exact reason I am finding it difficult to gain support within our business for Microsoft's online services.

 

Regardless, I trust you are working to provide an alternative solution that will allow for reports to schedule data refreshes from Web Page sources without having to use a gateway running on a local computer.

dimazaid's avatar
dimazaid
Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
9 years ago

Hello matmoore, and TBenders,

I'm sorry you're having difficulties. As I mentioned we're working on improving this in the future. But meanwhile, are you able to use the Power BI gateway to keep your new reports working? To be clear, this is impacting only new reports, if you have an existing report running, it will not have any impact on it. 

Regarding gaining support from your company, were you seeing any other issues in Power BI that we can help with? If so, please send me an email to dimazaid.at.microsoft.com and I'll be more than happy to go thru them.

Thanks!
Dimah 

  • matmoore's avatar
    matmoore
    Frequent Visitor
    9 years ago
    dimazaid,

    This is a report that was published, then updated recently using the latest version of Power BI desktop and republished.

    I'm all for future improvements, but breaking key features (and scheduled sync of online web page data sources is a huge one) before having the improvement ready is extremely poor form for a product targeted at business intelligence. Our business pays Microsoft for a cloud service, which means we expect not to have to run an application on a local server to feed data from a webpage to Power BI online which defeats the purpose of our subscription.

    The technical support provided by Microsoft to date has been to use a Personal Gateway (not acceptable as I'd need a computer running when the refresh is scheduled) or alternatively use the workaround in this post by using Google Sheets (even worse, a competitors product)!

    Will scheduled refresh of web.page data sources be supported by the "improvement" the Power BI team is working on?