One Power BI feature that almost passed me by (because it was released in August while I was on holiday) was the ability to create streaming datasets in the Power BI web app and push data to them via the Power BI REST API. This blog post has the announcement:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/real-time-in-no-time-with-power-bi/
The documentation is here:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-real-time-streaming/
And Charles Sterling has an example of how to use it with Flow and PowerApps here:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/charles_sterling/2016/10/17/how-to-create-and-customize-applications-with-powerapps-with-laura-onu-webinar-1020-10am-pst/

However, when I played around with this I found there were a few things that were either confusing or not properly documented, so I thought it would be useful to give an example of how to use this functionality to automatically synch data from a table in Excel to Power BI using a Power Query query.

Creating the streaming dataset in Power BI

Imagine that you have a table called Sales in an Excel workbook on your…