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When discussing with customers how they can use Power BI to improve collaborative business processes in an organization, we often hear that Power BI is used to summarize and visualize the data that many end users are entering, such as Excel files, SharePoint lists, or public data services. Business processes such as the management team's budget requests, planning recruitment activities, and evaluating marketing activities all conform to this model.

For this type of process, users usually want to update the Power BI report as soon as data is entered into the underlying system. Power BI's existing fixed refresh schedule is not enough to accomplish this task, and manually refreshing the Power BI dataset every time you access the report can add extra steps and cause confusion.

Now, the development team has made the refresh schedule more flexible to improve the way Power BI works in the above process. Specifically, the development team added a new refresh dataset operation to Microsoft Flow's Power BI connector. You will now be able to trigger a dataset refresh based on hundreds of Flow triggers. Whether the trigger is based on changes to items in the SharePoint list, updates to Excel files in OneDrive or SharePoint Online, or complex dates and schedules, there are many use cases for this operation.

I'm excited to think about it! Continue to read the complete tutorial on automatically refreshing SharePoint reports based on changes to the Power BI list using the new refresh dataset operation. Or, go directly to Flow and try it for yourself.

Tutorial: using Flow and Power BI to trigger a dataset refresh of a SharePoint list or OneDrive Excel file

In this tutorial, we will create a process that triggers a dataset refresh when a project in the SharePoint list is updated.

Consider an example: you are an office administrator at Northwind Traders, and your job is to ensure that the office has adequate office supplies by monitoring inventory, placing new orders, and maintaining the team's overall budget. You may have a report like this:

Assume that every employee in the company has access to the SharePoint list to report insufficient supplies in the office:

To ensure that you have an accurate understanding of supply requests and budget levels, any requests made on this SharePoint list should be reflected in the report immediately. You can easily automate this process using the new dataset refresh operation in Flow without having to manually refresh the dataset every time you or someone else view the report or wait until the next scheduled refresh. Download the official version of Power BI Desktop

To get started, navigate to Flow, log in, go to my process, select + New, and then select + automatic from the space in the drop-down menu. You should see the following:

Go ahead, name your Flow, and then select a SharePoint trigger based on your use case. In this example, because we want the stream to trigger when a new line is added to the list, select when the project is created or modified.

Next, click the + New step button and enter 'power bi'' in the search box. You should see the following list of actions:

Then select the new Refresh a dataset operation.

Now, let's move on to the final step of the flow: select the name of the workspace, and then select the name of the dataset to trigger the refresh. In our case, we chose the Northwind Traders workspace and the Northwind budget tracking dataset.

okay! Select Save and make sure your stream is open. Now, whenever there is a new supply request in the SharePoint list, your budget tracking dataset should be automatically refreshed.

Return to the budget tracking example for Northwind Traders, if the new request for the consumables request SharePoint list exceeds the budget:

Your process will be triggered and the dataset will be updated automatically. Considering that this person has ordered 500 4K monitors, you will surely know when you will not have a budget the next time you visit Northwind Budget&Supplies:

Next step

Try this feature! Go to Flow and perform the refresh automatically with the new refresh operation.

When you run a refresh dataset operation in Microsoft Flow, the existing limits of refresh are applied. For datasets of shared capacity used by Power BI Pro, your refresh operations are limited to eight times a day (including refreshes performed through scheduled refreshes). In advanced capacity, although you are limited by the resources available in your capacity, there is no limit on the number of refreshes per day. If there are not enough resources, refresh execution may be restricted until the load is reduced. If this limit exceeds 1 hour, the refresh will fail.

For more ideas on Flow, check out some existing Flow templates that allow you to add data from Flow to the Power BI dataset, or use data alerts to trigger Flow when the data changes. In the coming weeks, the development team will also add several Flow templates, including new refresh dataset operations, including those described in the above tutorials, stay tuned.

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