Professional Workflow›Extra· 40 min read

Workspaces, Apps & Scheduled Refresh

How teams really share Power BI: collaborate in a workspace, ship a polished app, and keep data fresh on a schedule.

What you will learn

Use workspaces to collaborate as a team
Bundle reports into an app for your audience
Set up scheduled refresh and understand the data gateway

Beyond “Publish to My workspace”

Earlier you published a report to My workspace — fine for practising alone. But real teams work together and share with many viewers. The Power BI Service has three tools for this: workspaces (where a team builds), apps (the polished package viewers receive), and scheduled refresh (so the data stays current). Let us meet each.

Workspaces — a shared room for a team

A workspace is a shared area in the Service where a team keeps related reports, datasets and dashboards and works on them together. Unlike My workspace (just you), a team workspace has members with different permission roles:

Role	Can do	Give it to
Admin	Everything, incl. manage people & delete	The workspace owner
Member	Edit content, publish, share	Core team builders
Contributor	Add and edit content	Report developers
Viewer	Only view (and use RLS-limited data)	The audience / stakeholders

A worked setup: create a workspace called Sales Analytics, add two analysts as Members so they can build, and add the sales managers as Viewers so they can only read. Everyone works from one shared, version-controlled place instead of emailing files.

Apps — the polished package for viewers

A workspace is a builders’ space, often messy with drafts. An app is the clean, published bundle you hand to your audience — only the reports you choose, organised with navigation, read-only. You build in the workspace, then publish an app from it.

Open your workspace and click Create app.
Choose which reports/dashboards to include and arrange the navigation.
Set the audience (who can open it) and click Publish app.
Share the app link; viewers open a tidy, read-only experience.

An app publishes only the finished content from a messy workspace

Workspace (builders)            App (viewers)
  Sales draft v3        ==>       Sales Performance
  Test report                     (only the finished reports,
  Finished report                  clean navigation, read-only)

Note: Output: Viewers open the “Sales Performance” app and see just the two finished reports with clean tabs to switch between them — none of the drafts or test pages from the workspace. Updating a report in the workspace and re-publishing the app pushes the new version to everyone at once.

Scheduled refresh — keep the data current

A published Import report holds a snapshot, so its numbers are frozen until refreshed. Scheduled refresh tells the Service to re-pull the source data automatically on a timetable, so viewers always see current figures without you reopening Desktop.

In the Service, open the dataset → Settings → Scheduled refresh.
Turn it On and add the times (e.g. 6am and 1pm daily).
Provide the source credentials if asked, then Apply.

Note: Output: The dataset now refreshes itself at 6am and 1pm every day: the Service re-reads the source, re-applies all your Power Query steps, and updates every report and app built on it. Your managers open the app in the morning to fresh numbers, automatically.

The data gateway — a bridge to on-premises data

There is one catch. If your data lives on your own computer or a company server (not in the cloud), the Service cannot reach it on its own to refresh. The on-premises data gateway is a small program you install on a machine near the data; it acts as a secure bridge so the cloud Service can pull from your local source on schedule.

The gateway lets the cloud Service refresh from data kept on-site

Power BI Service (cloud)  <==[ Data Gateway ]==>  Company database (on-site)
        needs fresh data          secure bridge        the real source

Note: Output: With the gateway installed and the dataset pointed at it, a scheduled refresh succeeds even though the database sits behind the company firewall — the gateway safely passes the request through. Cloud sources (like a file in OneDrive or an Azure database) do not need a gateway; only on-premises/local sources do.

Tip: A clean team flow: build in a workspace → set scheduled refresh (plus a gateway if the source is on-site) → publish an app to your viewers. Builders iterate in the workspace; viewers always get the polished, fresh app.

Watch out: Scheduled refresh on a free account is limited, and refreshing on-premises data requires a gateway — without it the refresh fails with a “cannot reach the data source” error. Most team features (apps, sharing, sufficient refreshes) need Power BI Pro or a Premium/Fabric capacity.

Q. Your published report reads from a database on your company server. What is needed so the Service can refresh it on a schedule?

Answer: On-premises/local sources are behind a firewall, so the cloud Service needs an on-premises data gateway as a secure bridge to pull the data for scheduled refresh. Cloud sources do not need one.

✍️ Practice

Create a workspace, add a teammate as a Member and another as a Viewer, and note what each can do.
Open a dataset’s settings and set up a daily scheduled refresh time.

🏠 Homework

Describe, in five steps, how you would take a finished report from your Desktop to a refreshed app your team can open — naming the workspace, app, refresh and (if needed) gateway.