'Adding static Excel to automatically refreshing Power BI report

I have an existing PowerBI report that imports data from an SQL Server analytics services database. This is working fine and I can schedule automatic refreshes using the Gateway provided by my organization.

I would now like to add some additional, but rarely changing data, that I only have in a local Excel file. When I do add this data, the report stops refreshing automatically and complains, that it has no gateway to refresh this Excel file.

What I would like is that Power BI is refreshing the data of the SQL Server analytics services database, but just keeps the existing Excel file without updating it. - I will upload an updated version of the PowerBI report if I need to change the data in the Excel file.

Is that possible? I couldn't find out how. I was trying to upload the Excel file to a different dataset to the Power BI service and reference this dataset in my report. Just to find out, that I cannot access a different Power BI dataset and SQL server analysis services database from the same report.



Solution 1:[1]

Three things I can think of

  1. Upload the file to onedrive/sharepoint so that it's accessible online (per Dev's answer)

  2. If the data is simple enough, you can add the data directly into PowerBI itself and skip the Excel file entirely.

UI

  1. You can disable the Excel file refresh so that PBI does not try and refresh(and thus access) the local Excel file. (Not sure if this will work)

UI

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Samuel Cochrane