It’s been awhile that lots of us were waiting for this feature. And some of us like me just tried to build it in our way. I spent some time to develop something similar using OData in combination with IIS and Basic Authentication features. Well, it was sort of successful and unsuccessful simultaneously! I mean, I was able to refresh SQL Server data remotely, but, when it came down to refreshing the dataset uploaded into the cloud Power BI it just failed. It was mainly because of the method that Power BI uses to refresh data.

By the way, I’m glad to see that we are finally able to refresh an on-premises SQL Server database from Power BI website. Refreshing data is very crucial for every report and dashboard which is working on top of frequently changing database. So we need to be able to schedule a data refresh on the cloud. Yesterday Microsoft announced a new gateway specially designed for supporting data refresh for on-premises data sources as below:

SQL Server
Oracle
Teradata
IBM DB2
PostgreSQL
Sybase
MySQL
SharePoint List
SQL Analysis Services Tabular model (uploaded data, not live connections)
File (CSV, XML, Text, Excel, Access)
Folder
Custom SQL/Native SQ

As you see SQL Server is not the only one.

Installing Power BI Personal Gateway

It’s easy to install the Gateway. Just make sure that meet the following requirements:

The machine that you’re going to install the Gateway on it should be always up and running
You can NOT install the Gateway on the same machine as a Power BI Analysis Services Connector

Continue reading →

It’s been awhile that we are waiting for a sensible improvements in Microsoft self-service BI. The good news is that finally there will be some cool new features added to the next version of Excel which is Excel 2016. By some, I mean, well, there not a lot new BI features, but, some. Something is better than nothing, not too bad though!

Integrating BI features with Excel:

Power View and Power Map:

As you know, Power Pivot was integrated as a built-it feature to Excel 2013. Now I’m really happy that the same thing happened to Power View and Power Map. So you don’t need to install them separately. You can now turn these features on from:

File–> Options–> Advanced-> (scroll down the page) Data-> Enable Data Analysis Add-ins: Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map

OR you can still turn them on from “COM Add-ins”:

Continue reading “What is new for BI in Excel 2016” →

In a previous post, “Hold Your Dashboards in Your Pocket, Part 1: Use Your Predefined Dashboards on Your IOS Devices“, I explained how to use Power BI app on your IOS devices.

In this post I express how to use Power BI app on your Windows devices. It’s relatively easy to install and use the Windows app.

Go to www.powerbi.com and click on the “Download from Windows Store” button

It automatically leads to the app page on your Windows Store
Click Install to install the app

After the app installed successfully open it from start menu

Click Sign In

Continue reading “Hold Your Dashboards in Your Pocket, Part 2: Use Your Predefined Dashboards on Your Windows Devices” →

Now it is time to take a step further and learn how to access our dashboards from our IOS or Windows devices. Microsoft designed a very good and handy app for IOS and Windows based tablets. At the moment the Windows app is only available for your laptop or on your Windows based tablet device. First of all you need to download the app on your device.

In this post I explain how to use your IOS devices to browse your dashboards everywhere that you have access to the Internet.

iPhone: