I have power bi configured on Azure, a dataset reading its data from excel document which is updated on daily basis.
The refresh is done manually through powerbi desktop. After I click on refresh, my reports and dashboards are reading updated figures, I open it from power bi desktop; however if I open it from any browser, data is not updated, I will have to publish my power bi reports and dashboards from power bi desktop publish button in order to see my data updated from browser.
Power BI desktop is the development tool for powerbi.com, after you have published it to powerbi.com, it has no relation with your offline .pbix file. Publishing it again (with the same name), will overwrite the file with it's data.
So a local refresh in power bi desktop has no influence on the file in powerbi.com
If you want that powerbi.com can read data from your excel file (on Premise), you'll have to setup a powerbi gateway. More information on following link:
Power BI gateway personal mode
On-premises data sources
A personal gateway is required in order to refresh datasets that get data from a supported on-premises data source in your organization.
With a gateway, REFRESH NOW and SCHEDULE REFRESH are supported for datasets uploaded from:
Microsoft Excel 2013 (or later) workbooks where Power Query or Power Pivot is used to connect to and query data from a supported on-premises data source. All on-premises data sources shown in Get External Data in Power Query or Power Pivot support refresh except for Hadoop file (HDFS) and Microsoft Exchange.
I had to uninstall my "on-premises data gateway (personal mode) and reinstall updated version. it is working now.
Related
I am creating a report in Power BI, where some data is imported from a cloud storage system. There is also a local data source (an excel sheet) being used.
My question is, if I publish this report on Power BI service and share it with someone, will they be able to see visuals using local data source as well?
There is also possibility of using Sharepoint. I can create a team in Sharepoint with the local excel file and use that as a source in Power BI. Am I correct in assuming this way people in my sharepoint team will be able to see all data in the report?
For your scenario with a spreadsheet from a desktop and a cloud data source:
If you prepare the report using import mode in PowerBI desktop and publish it to PowerBI online, then that report data will be visible to all users with access to the report in the provisioned workspace. The caveat is that data will not be able to be refreshed from the Excel file once the report is deployed online. When you create the report on your desktop, you have access to the cloud data and the spreadsheet, then a copy of that data is published to the PowerBI service. When PowerBI service is set to refresh, then it can't connect to your desktop and causes the issue.
To solve this you either need a personal or standard gateway. This provides the technology for PowerBI to connect to your on-premise (standard gateway) or on-desktop (personal mode) data. Once the gateway is in place, PowerBI can pull data in to the cloud from an on-premise network or a personal desktop to refresh reports.
The other alternative is, as you mention, putting the excel in SharePoint online. This effectively makes the spreadsheet a "cloud data source" and can be refreshed from PowerBI service without the need for a gateway.
I want to provide access to data from a DataWareHouse to several users of my company. I need to create a dataset with filtered data and then I want to provide to granted users access to those data inside Excel on Mac Os.
I don't know if this is possible as the feature "Analyze on Excel" is not available for download on Mac Os.
Any ideas?
Connection to the Power BI datasets via Power Query, can't be done on Excel for MacOS as it is not supported. Power Query for MacOS Excel is limited to csv, json and d few others. Power Pivot for MacOS isn't available.
You can connect to OLAP sources like SQL Server Tabular using this paid for option, but only for On-premise SSAS, or Azure Analysis Service. If you have Power BI Premium, the CDATA plugin might be able to connect to the xmla endpoint of the dataset.
The other option is create the filtered data model with PBI Desktop on Windows and deploy it to the service, then to give them access to the Power BI Service. The user can then create their own reports, or export the data via csv, but the export size it limited to 100,000 rows.
For Mac users Power BI is mostly limited to viewing/creating the reports in the service.
According to this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/unleashing-insights-from-data-in-documentdb-with-power-bi/ DocumentDB connector is available for both Power Bi online and Power Bi Desktop.
But when I go to Get Data -> Databases in Power Bi online, I do not see any way to connect to Document DB. I can see the connector only in Power Bi Desktop.
Is Document DB supported as data source in Power Bi online? if no, is there any workaround to make it work? I have a requirement to feed schema-less data (located in Azure) to Power Bi online, I'm searching for any way to do it, whether this is Document DB or some other NoSQL database
please allow me to clarify that connectivity to a DocumentDB account via PowerBI.com is actually there. Currently, the "Get Data" in PowerBI.com only offers data sources with DirectQuery capability. Please see this article on DirectQuery. We are working to support DirectQuery in future. For now, there are two ways to push DocumentDB data to PowerBI.com. The first method is what Denny has suggested: build the report via PowerBI Desktop and publish the report to PowerBI.com. The second method is to leverage PowerBI API to connect and push data from a DocumentDB account to PowerBI.com.
First of all, I'd like to apologize for my initial answer as I completely missed your key issue about utilizing Power BI Online. Allow me to try to make amends by attempting a more complete and proper answer.
In the case of Power BI Online, because the Power BI-to-DocumentDB connector is currently in beta, it is not available as a data source within Power BI Online under the Get Data section as you noted. Saying this, you can create a connection to DocumentDB using the Power BI desktop, publish it to Power BI Online, and then refresh it within Power BI Online. Following the "Power BI tutorial for DocumentDB: Visualize data using the Power BI connector" tutorial, here is a screenshot of running the data refresh on PowerBI.com using the credentials to your DocumentDB database.
Note, there are is already a request on the Power BI Ideas forum to have DocumentDB available directly within Power BI Online - you can read more and vote for it (if appropriate) at: https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/7160908-documentdb.
Some additional references that may be helpful:
Data Refresh in Power BI: Here is some additional information about how Data Refresh works in Power BI.
Power BI Content Packs: For more information on connectors between Power BI and other data sources, please reference Content Packs.
I would like to know how Power BI Embedded support data refresh, or schedule to refresh data like Power BI service on "Import" mode, I am not using Direct Query.
Also, does Power BI embedded has file size limitation 250M like power BI service in "Import" mode?
According to What is Microsoft Power BI Embedded, data refresh is not supported:
Cached datasets can be used in Preview. However, you cannot refresh cached data once it has been loaded into Microsoft Power BI Embedded.
According to Connecting to a data source, only DirectQuery is supported:
With Power BI Embedded, you can embed reports into your own app. When you embed a Power BI report into your app, the report connects to the underlying data by importing a copy of the data or connecting directly to the data source using DirectQuery.
I believe Power BI Embedded has the same 250 MB limitation for import.
I successfully managed to connect a java application to Power BI REST API and managed to create a dataset and added some data.
I can view this data from Power BI web interface, make reports, graph etc.
Is it possible to connect Power BI Desktop to this datasets and create custom reports from there?
I'm asking this because the desktop application seems to be more complete. You can edit column names, merge tables, etc. all things that are not available in the web application.
Thanks all for the help.
The Power BI Desktop does not support connecting to real-time data sets in the Power BI service at this time.
Could you submit this as a request to https://ideas.powerbi.com?
It is possible to use REST API Dataset in Power Bi Desktop since April 2017 and it worked for me in the latest version of Power BI Desktop.
But even though you can create reports based on datasets from Power BI Service, you still cannot edit column names, merge tables, etc.
The features is called Power BI service Live connection.
To establish a connection to the published report, and create your own report based on the published dataset, select Get Data from the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop, and select Power BI service. You can also select it from Get Data > Online Services > Power BI service.
After the report is finished, you can publish your report by selecting Publish from the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop.
More details on Power BI documentation page.