I have a report working in the off-prem Power BI, and the refreshing every 2 hours seems to be working. Data source is a group of smallish SharePoint Lists (also in off-prem O365 cloud). The Refresh button at the top of the report page looks like it does something (brief flash), and no error messages, but data from lists is not refreshed. I suspect maybe this button is not intended to pull data from non direct query sources, but I can't find any decent documentation on its behavior.
If that is the case, how is a user supposed to see recent data in a use case where the underlying List data may have been manually edited and you want to see the changes? I see no way to make this List data a "direct query" (is there some way?). Advice to use a direct queryable source like SQL Server or SQL Azure is not too helpful, as the reason we chose SP Lists is that we have no resources to build a web front end app to edit and see data in an RDBMS. The "free" UI in SharePoint, plus the somewhat table like views you can get of List data, makes it attarctive. Of course, if anyone has a suggestion on how to easily built a simple CRUD type front end to SQL Azure (Power Apps doesn't seem to do it), that may help.
Thanks.