How do you schedule refresh the data on the Power BI online service?

You have created reports on the Power BI desktop and published it on Power BI online service for your peers to see. Now, there is a requirement for the report to be changed as per changes on the data every day. Do you manually refresh the report and publish it each time?

Power BI gives us the solution through scheduled refresh on its online service.
Scheduled refresh is an option available on the Power BI online platform to refresh the data on a periodic basis. The data, when imported, is copied into the Power BI database with the changes and updates to the existing dataset on a time that can be set by the administrator (dataset owner). This allows the reports to work ceaselessly.
Let’s get into how it is done.
1. Login to you Online Service
2. Select the workspace that your dataset is in, on the menu bar to the left of you screen.

3. Go to the datasets tab. Select the third option which is a rectangle icon with a small refresh symbol at the bottom under actions to edit the scheduled refresh.

4. Select the Scheduled refresh tab under the settings for your dataset.

5. Under the Scheduled refresh tab, you can find various setting such as the refresh frequency, time zone, time of refresh., send refresh failure notifications.
• The refresh frequency is daily or weekly. Time zone is to be set according to the report consumer’s location.
• Set time for the scheduled refresh, ideally hours before the consumer refers to the report. There is usually 15-minute duration for the tiles to get refreshed on the report after the dataset changes. You can enter a maximum of 8 different schedules on the pro version. On a premium account, you can set up to 48 different schedules.
• You can opt for refresh failure notifications. You can enter the email IDs (already approved for access to this dataset), they will receive emails if the refresh fails.

If there is a Power BI dataflow source in your dataset, mind that the dataflow also has a scheduled refresh that is independent of your dataset.

Power BI scheduled refresh helps you keep the data updated without any sort of manual intervention and hence can be very useful in data which is constantly in change. By following the instructions above, you can achieve setting this up.