How to Refresh Power BI Report

A Power BI report is only as valuable as the data powering it. When your data is stale, so are your insights. This article will show you exactly how to refresh your Power BI reports, covering both simple manual updates in Power BI Desktop and a detailed guide to setting up automated, scheduled refreshes in Power BI Service.

Understanding Your Refresh Options

In Power BI, "refreshing" means updating the data within your report to reflect the latest information from the original data sources. There are two primary ways to do this, and understanding the difference is the first step:

• Manual Refresh: This is an on-demand process that you trigger yourself. It's perfect for when you're actively building or developing a report in Power BI Desktop or need an immediate update in the Power BI Service.
• Scheduled Refresh: This is a "set it and forget it" approach where you configure Power BI to automatically refresh your data on a specific schedule (e.g., every morning at 8 AM). This is the key to maintaining consistently up-to-date reports for your team without any manual effort.

Let's walk through how to perform each type.

How to Manually Refresh in Power BI Desktop

Refreshing in Power BI Desktop is most common during the report creation phase. As you're building visuals and cleaning data, you'll want to pull in the latest information to ensure everything is working correctly. The process is simple and straightforward.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Open your report file: Start by opening your Power BI file (the one with the .pbix extension) in Power BI Desktop.
2. Locate the Refresh Button: In the main toolbar at the top of the application, you'll see a 'Home' tab. The "Refresh" button is usually located right in the middle of this ribbon.
3. Click 'Refresh': A single click on this button kicks off the entire refresh process. Power BI will then:

Pro Tip: Refreshing a Single Table

If your report uses multiple data sources but you only need to update one, you can save time by refreshing just that specific table. To do this:

1. Make sure you're in the 'Report' view.
2. On the right side of the screen, you'll see the 'Fields' pane, which lists all of your tables.
3. Hover over the table you want to update, click the ellipsis (...) that appears, and select "Refresh data."

This triggers a refresh for that one table only, which can be much quicker if your other data sources are large.

How to Set Up a Scheduled Refresh in Power BI Service

Once your report is complete, you'll publish it to the Power BI Service so you and your team can view and interact with it online. This is where automated refreshes become incredibly powerful, ensuring everyone is always looking at the latest data.

Setting this up involves a few more steps, but once it's done, your report will maintain itself.

Understanding the Power BI Gateway

Before diving into the steps, it's important to understand the concept of a "Gateway."

The Power BI Service lives in the cloud. If your data sources also live in the cloud (like Google Analytics, Salesforce, or a cloud-based SQL database), Power BI can connect to them directly. No gateway needed.

However, if your data source is "on-premises" — meaning it's located on your computer or a server within your company's network (like an Excel file on your C: drive or an internal company SQL Server) — the Power BI Service can't reach it. The On-Premises Data Gateway acts as a secure bridge, allowing the Power BI Service to communicate with your internal data sources to refresh the data.

Step-by-Step: Setting Up the Schedule

Assuming you've already published your report from Desktop to the Service:

1. Navigate to the Dataset: Open your browser and go to app.powerbi.com. In the left navigation pane, find the Workspace where you published your report. Inside the workspace, you'll see your Report, and a separate item for the Dataset associated with it. Schedules are set on the Dataset, not the Report.
2. Open Settings: Hover over your dataset, click the ellipsis (...), and choose "Settings."
3. Configure Your Connections:
4. Activate the Schedule: Scroll down to the "Refresh" section and expand it. Click the toggle to turn "Scheduled refresh" on.
5. Define the Frequency and Times:
6. Set Failure Notifications: It's a great practice to check the box for "Send refresh failure notifications to me." This way, if something breaks, you'll get an email alert and can investigate promptly.
7. Apply Your Changes: Once you've configured your schedule, click the "Apply" button at the bottom.

That's it! Your report will now automatically fetch the latest data from your sources according to the schedule you've set.

Troubleshooting Common Refresh Failures

Even with everything set up, refreshes can sometimes fail. Here are a few of the most common problems and how to solve them:

• Gateway is Offline: The computer where your On-Premises Gateway is installed must be on and connected to the internet for the refresh to succeed. If it's shut down or asleep, the refresh will fail.
• Invalid Credentials: Passwords change. If you update a password for a data source, you must update it in Power BI Service as well. Go back to the Dataset Settings > Data source credentials and edit them with the new login info.
• Formula Errors or Data Structure Changes: If a column is renamed or removed in your source data, it can break one of your Power Query transformation steps. To fix this, you'll need to open the .pbix file in Power BI Desktop, go into the Power Query Editor to correct the broken step, and re-publish the report.
• Refresh Timeout: Power BI has limits on how long a refresh can run (e.g., 2 hours for datasets in shared capacity). If your data is too large or your queries are too complex, it can time out. To solve this, focus on optimizing your Power Query steps and your data model to be more efficient. For advanced users on Premium, investigating incremental refresh is an option.

Final Thoughts

Knowing how to refresh your data is fundamental to making Power BI a dynamic and reliable tool for your business. Whether you're doing a quick manual pull in Desktop or setting up a robust daily schedule in the Service, this process is what breathes life into your reports and ensures your team makes decisions based on facts, not outdated analysis.

Maintaining those connections and refresh schedules, however, is often where teams spend a lot of their time - troubleshooting gateways, managing credentials, and waiting for scheduled updates. At Graphed, we felt this pain and wanted to make getting real-time analysis effortless. We help your business intelligence tools by connecting directly to tools like Google Analytics and Salesforce, so your data is always live, automatically updating dashboards. You can just ask a question about your campaigns or sales with natural language and get an instant, current answer, skipping the entire troubleshooting and data refresh process and getting to the insight.