I've had a lot of issues with the Power BI service.
I connected to a onedrive excel file using the PBI service (that I had shared with a coworker) and created a small dashboard. My understanding is that (1) as long as the data connection is through Onedrive it will update automatically even with the Power BI basic service?
It was working fine, and would update pretty quickly whenever we made a change to the data. After using it for a week, I needed to make some "schema" changes to the excel file, adding a couple columns. Of course that completely broke the report. I rebuilt it in the service from scratch, but now it never updates. After changing a field value from blank to "test 2" in the excel, it still shows blank. I even removed the data source from powerbi and rebuilt it (a day later) and it is still showing the old data with the blank instead of the "test 2". It is like somehow that datasource is staying in power bi (and is frozen) even when I delete it.
This should be a simple process, instead it is really convoluted and terrible. I'm very close to giving up on this product.
I have a couple other questions, too.
Can you build a dashboard with Power BI Desktop using a onedrive excel file and when you publish have it connect directly to the onedrive file and update automatically? If so how? To me it seems that the only way to get it to update is to open up Power BI desktop and "publish". Seems hard to believe but observing it that is what it looks like to me.
Is there really no way to control the formatting of numbers in Power BI Service? We have a $ column, and in excel it is formatted $###,###. In Power BI it is formatting ######.
Any help is greatly appreciated.