Did it ever happen to you that the Power BI update did not work? There might be several reasons for this problem and it is always user’s fault. We will model a few of these situations on a timesheet. Our goal is to find out why the report refresh does not perform without an error. Problems occur mostly when working with source file types as Excel. If you are connecting on data to SQL Server database, you will probably encounter these errors less often.

Source data moved or the file changed its name

It is quite common we put the report together in a hurry in power bi desktop app from Excel data for example. We then upload it to web and after a while move the source Excel somewhere else or rename it. Pbi file (power bi desktop file) obviously remembers directions to original location and will signal error during report attempt.

Original source file Projekty.xlsx will be renamed to Projekty_.xlsx

and an error during Refresh attempt is born: Datasource.Error: Could not find file …..

It is Important to Secure Source Data Quality

Another common reason can be a mistake in data quality in some field of data type. Data type change in 1 cell of source Excel can result in the whole report stopping to work.

I will change the date in D6 cell to nonsense value 32.10.2017 (date doesnt exists)

What will happen during the report refresh attempt? The result is error 1 of the loaded queries contained Errors and the power bi update again does not work correctly. The report will stay in its original state.

When we click on view errors, Power query warns us about problem with upload of 1 row (the one we changed).

Change of data source type will also cause Power bi refresh to not work properly

Another cause can be change of data type in source data, even an unwanted one. Again, small incautiousness with one cell is enough. I will change data type in cell G8 from original type number to text, as seen in the picture below.

Again, we have exactly same error