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Scheduled Refreshes

As you know, you can click the "Refresh" button in the Home ribbon to refresh your data in Power BI Desktop. But when you publish your report to the Power BI Service, you can also set up an automatic refresh schedule. This keeps your reports current without the need to manually open Power BI Desktop and click refresh.

Why Scheduled Refreshes Matter

Dashboards are only useful if the data is current. Imagine a sales dashboard that shows last month's numbers when stakeholders expect to see yesterday's results. They'll lose trust in the dashboard quickly.

Scheduled refreshes solve this by automatically pulling fresh data at regular intervals.

Just remember, your data source must be accessible from the cloud for scheduled refreshes to work. If your data lives on a local file or behind a firewall, you'll need a data gateway.

How to Schedule Refreshes

Again, you don't need to do this now. These steps happen in the Power BI Service in your browser, after publishing your report. But just so you know the process:

  1. Open Power BI Service and go to the workspace containing your published report.
  2. Select the report's semantic model from the workspace's content list.
  3. On the semantic model's details page, select Refresh → Schedule refresh.
  4. Configure the gateway connection and data source credentials if required. Our local CSV files would need a gateway so the Service could access them.
  5. In the Refresh section, turn on Configure a refresh schedule, choose the frequency, time zone, and refresh times, then click Apply.

See Microsoft's scheduled refresh guide for more details.

Common Refresh Frequencies
Data Type Example Refresh Schedule
Frequently changing data Every 30 minutes with Premium or Fabric
Daily sales data Once per day (overnight)
Weekly reports Once per week
Historical analysis On-demand

The available schedule depends on your license and capacity: Power BI Pro supports up to 8 scheduled refreshes per day; Premium per user and Premium/Fabric capacity support up to 48. Scheduled refresh is not real-time, and refreshes can start somewhat later than their scheduled time.