Power BI Blog: Using OneDrive and Setting Up Automatic Updates

Welcome back to our Power BI blog series! This week, and throughout November, we’re going to walk through an example of how to connect Power BI to a data source saved on OneDrive.

You’ll be able to follow along by accessing the dataset at http://bit.ly/SP_PowerBIExamples. Save it to your own OneDrive folder.

Now, you can access items in your own OneDrive folder using the Power BI Service. However, if you need to transform or modify the data, it’s better to use Power BI Desktop to connect to it.

To connect to the dataset, first you’ll need to get a link to it. Go to OneDrive (in your browser or on your desktop), open the file in Excel (not Excel Online), go to Info, click on the file path that says OneDrive, and “Copy path to clipboard”.

You’ll want to connect via Web to the link specified. However, you want to get rid of the bit at the end that says “?web=1” – remove that, so the web link should just end with your “.xlsx” file.

You will need to use the “Organizational account” access settings and sign in to whichever account has access to it.

Once you’re in, you’ll have access to the Navigator screen to work with your data, and can then proceed to clean it up as necessary.

Next week, we’ll do a quick clean-up of the data and publish it to the Power BI Service. There, we will show you how to set up your report so that it refreshes automatically. See you then!