You can automatically keep your workbooks up to date using the scheduled refresh functionality in Power BI for Office 365 sites. This blog post provides an overview of how the feature works, and links to a few different related pages in the Office 365 online help.
Enabling refresh
After you’ve saved your workbook to your Power BI site, you can configure scheduled data refresh by click on the ellipsis (…) next to the workbook, and selecting Schedule Data Refresh.
On the next page, you’ll select which data connections you want to refresh, configure the schedule, and enter one or more email addresses to notify if the refresh fails. You can choose to refresh one or more data connections from the workbook’s Data Model. When you configure the schedule, you can select the frequency (Daily or Weekly), and the time of day the refresh should occur.
Refresh history
Once your workbook has been enabled for data refresh, you’ll be able to view its refresh history. To get to the refresh history page, click on the Schedule Data Refresh option, and click on the history tab. From this page you can see when the refresh was done, whether it succeeded, and any error messages if it wasn’t able to complete. It will also tell you when the next scheduled refresh will occur, and when a refresh operation is currently running.
Data source configuration
Scheduled data refresh works against data sources in the cloud (like Windows Azure SQL Database and OData services), and corporate data sources on-premises. Access to these data sources will need to be pre-configured before they can be used with scheduled refresh. If a data source has not been properly configured, you’ll see it listed in the errors on the refresh history page.
To enable data refresh for cloud data sources, see the SharePoint Online help pages for using external data.
To enable data refresh for on-premises data sources, see the Power BI Admin Center help pages for Creating a Data Source and Enabling Cloud Access.
Note – scheduled data refresh doesn’t work with all data sources that you can connect to using Power Pivot and Power Query. You can find a list of supported data sources in the Office 365 help pages.
More information
Please see the following entries in the Office 365 online help for more details on scheduled data refresh in Power BI.