Recently, one of our workstations used for automated reports refresh “died”. OS stopped to load after reboot.
Fortunately, all necessary stuff were copied to backup.
We used “Self-Service BI for poor” approach on that machine. Excel + Vbscripts, scheduled in Windows Task Scheduler.
It’s typical task was to handle following simplified schema
- Run Excel
- Open workbook
- RefreshAll (Power Query connections + Data Model)
- Save workbook
- Kill Excel
Repeat for all reports scheduled in Task Manager.