Work with dummy data in Desktop and refresh with actual data in Service?

[nikkirai]

Hi all,

So I have Power BI Desktop on my personal computer and don't have Desktop installed in the secured Citrix computer. To protect sensitive data, my plan is to create visualizations and do calculations with dummy data in Power BI Desktop, publish it to Power BI Service, then refresh with real data in Citrix. How do I change the source of my data in Service once I published the pbix file to Service? Thanks for your input.

[ibarrau · Accepted solution]

Hi nikkirai. You can achieve this with Parameters. Creating a parameter for the source path, server, database, etc. Once published you can change the value of the parameter for the production environment.

Keep in mind that if the data is onpremise you must install a Data Gateway to let the dataset reach the source.

Example of parameters as sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnaDJkGOmIE

I hope that helps,