How to Refresh Data in Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Power BI is a powerful tool to visualize your data sources, but it’s important to keep the data up-to-date in order to generate accurate reports. Here’s our quick step-by-step guide on how to refresh data in Power BI.

Refreshing Data in Power BI

To refresh your data in Power BI, first ensure that you’ve opened a report in Power BI Desktop or the Power BI Service. Next, you’ll find a Refresh Now button at the top-right of the application. Click this, then wait for the refresh process to complete. Your data source should now be updated and it will be reflected in the report.

If you have multiple reports, you’ll have to open them manually and click Refresh Now on each one.

Scheduling Automatic Refresh in Power BI

Clicking the Refresh Now button on every report can be bothersome at times, especially if you have many different reports that need to be updated. Thankfully, you can automate this process.

To do so, open your report and go to the Settings option. Next, select Data Source Credentials and ensure that the Privacy Level is configured correctly. Once done, you can select the Scheduled Refresh option. Turn this to On and then pick the refresh frequency that you want.

This method works for the majority of data sources in Power BI, but might not work for everything. There are some data sources that will still require manual refreshing, or they might take extra steps before you can enable automatic refreshing.

Depending on the version of Power BI that you’re using, you may have additional options and settings for your refreshes. It’s worth looking at the version that you have access to and seeing if it fits your needs in terms of scheduled automatic refreshing.

How PBRS simplifies Power BI Data Refreshes and Report Distribution

PBRS is an intuitive software product that helps businesses save time and money by adding automation features to Power BI and SSRS Reports. It integrates seamlessly into your existing Power BI infrastructure and offers new features such as automatic sending as PDF attachments via email and formatting them for Excel documents.

PBRS also offers powerful features like event based schedules. This gives you the ability to run any existing schedule when a trigger condition is met. This opens up powerful automated processes, such as updating databases and creating system alerts under various conditions. These schedules are simple to create with PBRS’s built-in tools, and they offer a lot of flexibility to fine-tune your processes.

You also get access to powerful export options via PBRS’s Destinations feature. Users can manually add destinations such as email, disk, FTP, DropBox, or even fax. When exporting reports, they can automatically be sent to various destinations as required. These features can also be used to export data into various formats, such as an Excel spreadsheet.