Scheduled refresh

Once a report is published to the Power BI Service, it can refresh itself, for example every morning before the team starts work. You don’t need a gateway: the feed is on the internet, and the Power BI Service reads it directly.

Publish the report

1. In Power BI Desktop, save the report.
2. Select Home → Publish. Sign in to the Power BI Service if asked.
3. Choose a workspace and select Select. Wait for the Success message.

Enter the API token

The Power BI Service doesn’t take the token from Power BI Desktop. You enter it once more.

1. Open app.powerbi.com and go to the workspace.
2. Find the semantic model with your report’s name (older versions of Power BI call it a dataset). Select ⋯ → Settings.
3. Expand Data source credentials and select Edit credentials next to the feed.
4. Set Authentication method to Basic, User name to export, and Password to your API token.
5. Select Sign in.

Tip

Create a separate API token for the Power BI Service, labelled for example Power BI Service. Then you can see when the service last refreshed, and replace one token without touching the other.

Set the schedule

1. On the same settings page, expand Refresh.
2. Turn on Configure a refresh schedule.
3. Choose how often (Daily or Weekly) and your Time zone.
4. Select Add another time for each time of day you want a refresh.
5. Select Apply.

The report now refreshes on its own. If a refresh fails, Power BI emails the owner of the semantic model.

How often can it refresh?

Power BI Pro allows up to 8 scheduled refreshes a day, Premium up to 48. Zendesk also limits how fast data can be read. If you have several large reports, give them different times instead of refreshing them all at once.

When the token changes

An API token stops working when it expires or is revoked, and scheduled refresh starts to fail. Before that happens:

1. Create a new token on the API Tokens tab of the app.
2. Repeat Enter the API token with the new token.
3. If you also refresh from Power BI Desktop, update it there as well. See Replacing the token.

See API tokens for how long tokens last.