How to Update Power BI Report with New Data

A Power BI report is only as valuable as the data behind it. Making strategic decisions based on a report that’s a week old is like driving by looking in the rearview mirror. Keeping your data fresh is not just a best practice, it's essential. This guide will walk you through exactly how to update your Power BI reports, from simple manual refreshes in the Desktop app to setting up a fully automated schedule in the Power BI Service.

Why Keeping Your Power BI Reports Updated is Non-Negotiable

In a fast-moving business, stale data can lead to missed opportunities and poor decisions. Imagine your marketing team planning a campaign based on last month's customer behavior, or a sales manager coaching their team using last week's pipeline numbers. The insights are already out of date.

Regularly refreshing your data ensures that your reports reflect the ground truth of your business right now. It transforms your dashboards from static historical documents into dynamic tools that support real-time planning, analysis, and execution. When everyone from the CEO to a marketing coordinator is looking at the same trusted, up-to-date information, the entire organization becomes more agile and data-driven.

Understanding the Different Types of "Refresh" in Power BI

The term "refresh" can mean slightly different things in the Power BI ecosystem. Before we dive into the "how," let's quickly clarify what we're talking about so you know exactly what’s happening behind the scenes.

Data Refresh (or Dataset Refresh): This is the big one and the main focus of this article. A data refresh updates the data inside your dataset by querying the original sources. When you do a data refresh, Power BI connects to your SQL database, SharePoint list, Excel file, or other sources and pulls in any new or changed information.
Package Refresh: This happens when you publish an updated version of your .pbix file from Power BI Desktop to the Power BI Service. It syncs the report structure, visuals, and the data model itself, but doesn't necessarily get new data from the original source. It's more about updating the report's design and logic.
Tile Refresh: On a Power BI dashboard, individual tiles (visuals pinned from reports) update automatically roughly every hour to show the latest data from the dataset. Pro users can also trigger a manual dashboard-wide tile refresh.
Visual Container Refresh: Within a report, visuals update as you interact with them - by applying filters or slicers, for instance. This doesn't pull new data from the source, it just re-queries the existing data loaded into the dataset.

For the rest of this guide, when we say "refresh," we'll be referring to the all-important Data Refresh.

How to Manually Refresh Data in Power BI Desktop

The simplest way to update your data is directly within the Power BI Desktop application. This is ideal when you're actively building a report and want to see the latest numbers reflect in your visuals.

This process pulls the most recent data from your sources into the local * .pbix* file saved on your computer.

Step-by-Step Manual Refresh

Open Your Report: Launch Power BI Desktop and open the * .pbix* file you want to update.
Find the Refresh Button: In the 'Home' tab of the top ribbon, you'll see a prominent "Refresh" button.
Click Refresh: Click the button. A small window will appear, showing Power BI establishing connections to your data sources and loading fresh data. This could take a few seconds or several minutes, depending on the size of your dataset and the speed of your connections.

Once the process is complete, all the visuals in your report will update to reflect the newly imported data. You can now analyze and save your report with the latest information before publishing it to the Power BI Service.

How to Set Up Automatic Refreshes in the Power BI Service

Manually opening and refreshing a report every day isn't efficient. The true power of Power BI comes from automating this process in the cloud-based Power BI Service. Once configured, you can have your published reports update automatically - up to eight times a day on a Pro license and 48 times a day on Premium.

Before you can automate, there are two preliminary steps: publishing your report and setting up your data source credentials.

Step 1: Publish Your Report to the Power BI Service

From Power BI Desktop, with your report open, click the "Publish" button on the 'Home' ribbon. You'll be prompted to select a destination workspace. Once published, your report and its associated dataset will be available online in your Power BI account.

Step 2: Configure Your Data Source Credentials

For the Power BI Service to connect to your data sources on its own, it needs permission. You must securely provide the login credentials for each source the dataset uses.

Navigate to your workspace in the Power BI Service (app.powerbi.com).
Find the dataset associated with your report. They usually share the same name. Click the ellipsis (…) next to its name and select 'Settings'.
Under 'Dataset settings', expand the 'Data source credentials' section.
You'll see a list of data sources used by your dataset. For each one, you may see a warning link that reads 'Credentials are not valid'. Click 'Edit credentials'.
A pop-up will appear where you can securely enter the required information, such as a user name and password for a database, or an OAuth2 sign-in for a cloud service like SharePoint.
Once authenticated, you'll see a small message confirming that the source is successfully connected.

Step 3: Schedule the Refresh

With permissions granted, you can now tell Power BI when to automatically refresh your data.

In the same 'Settings' page for your dataset, scroll down and expand the 'Scheduled refresh' section.
Toggle the 'Keep your data up to date' option to 'On'.
Select a 'Refresh frequency'. You can choose between 'Daily' and 'Weekly'.
Choose your 'Time zone' to ensure the refresh happens at the correct local time.
Under 'Time', click 'Add another time' to specify when you'd like the refresh to run. For a daily refresh on a Pro license, you can add up to eight different time slots. A common practice is to schedule refreshes to complete just before the business day starts.

You can also opt-in to receive email notifications if a scheduled refresh fails, which is highly recommended for troubleshooting.

Another option here is the "Refresh now" button. In the workspace view, hover over your dataset and click the circular arrow icon. This triggers an immediate, on-demand refresh, which is useful for pulling in urgent data outside of your scheduled times.

Using a Power BI Gateway for On-Premises Data

What if your data isn't in a cloud service? What if it's in an Excel file on your company's shared drive or a SQL Server database sitting in a server rack in your office basement? The Power BI Service, being a cloud platform, can't directly access these local, on-premises sources.

This is where the On-premises Data Gateway comes in. Think of it as a secure bridge or a bouncer for your data. You install this small piece of software on a computer within your local network that is always on and connected to the internet. It acts as an agent that securely ferries data refresh requests from the Power BI Service to your internal data source, and then sends the fresh data back up to the cloud to update your dataset.

You only need a gateway if one or more of your data sources are not publicly accessible via the internet.

Do you need a gateway for a public webpage or SharePoint Online? No.
Do you need a gateway for a local file share or an internal SQL server? Yes.

Setting up the gateway involves installing the application, signing in with your Power BI account, and then configuring the connections within the gateway settings screen in the Power BI Service. Once configured, the scheduled refresh process works exactly as described above.

Troubleshooting Common Power BI Refresh Failures

Sooner or later, a scheduled refresh will fail. Don't panic. The failure notification email usually provides a clue about what went wrong. Here are some of the most common culprits and how to fix them:

Expired Credentials: This is a very common issue. The password for the account used to connect to a data source (like a SQL database) may have changed due to company security policies. Simply go back to the dataset settings, edit the credentials with the new password, and you're good to go.
Gateway is Offline: The computer running your on-premises data gateway might be turned off, sleeping, or disconnected from the internet. Ensure the machine is always-on and has a stable network connection.
Data Source Unavailable: The source itself might be unreachable. The server could be down for maintenance, or if it's a file, it might have been moved or renamed. Check if you can access the data source directly, and confirm its location and name haven't changed.
Changes in Data Structure (Schema): A refresh can fail if the underlying data has changed in an unexpected way. For example, if a column in your source data that you use in your report has been renamed or deleted, Power Query will throw an error because it can't find it. You'll need to open the * .pbix* file in Power BI Desktop and fix the broken transformation steps in the Power Query Editor.
Refresh Times Out: For very large datasets, the refresh might take longer than the limit allowed by Power BI (two hours for shared capacity). In these cases, you might need to optimize your data model, streamline your Power Query transformations to be more efficient, or explore options like Incremental Refresh, a more advanced feature for handling massive datasets.

Final Thoughts

Keeping your Power BI reports fresh is a straightforward process once you understand the key pieces: manual refresh for development in Desktop, and scheduled refresh for automation in the Service. With the right configuration, including a data gateway for on-premises sources, your team can always make decisions with confidence, backed by the most current data available.

While Power BI is a powerful tool, setting up complicated refresh schedules, troubleshooting broken gateways, and waiting for reports can still disrupt your workflow. We created Graphed to remove this friction entirely. Instead of configuring data pipelines and scheduling updates, you just connect your sales and marketing sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce once. Our platform keeps your dashboards live and updated in real-time automatically - no need to worry about gateways or refresh failures. You can just ask for the report you want in plain English, and have a live, shareable dashboard in seconds, not hours.