In April 2017 we got the ability to connect our Power BI Reports to datasets in the service (link) and that is really cool.

Today I got a question from a colleague on how to change a reports dataset in order to separate the reports from the data model – thereby having a pbix file with data model and then design reports by connecting to the dataset in the Power BI service and I came up with this workaround.

This technique can also be used if you have reports that you want to change the connection of a report to an Azure Analysis Services or copying a report to another workspace and modify the connection to a dataset in that report.

Let’s see how we can do this

In this example I have designed a data model and report that is connected to data in a SQL database