Free Power BI Incremental Refresh Setup Calculator
Answer two questions about your data, get the exact Archive/Refresh period settings and a ready-to-paste Power Query filter — the real RangeStart/RangeEnd pattern, not a guess. Instant, no signup.
Power Query filter to paste on your date column
Setup steps
What incremental refresh actually does
Without it, every scheduled refresh reloads your entire table from scratch — slow, and wasteful once a table has years of history that never changes. Incremental refresh splits the table into date-based partitions: an archive window of older, mostly-static data that's loaded once and then left alone, and a smaller refresh window of recent data that's reloaded every time. A sales table going back 3 years where only the last 10 days ever get corrected only needs to touch those 10 days on every refresh, not all 3 years.
RangeStart and RangeEnd, exactly
Power BI requires two Power Query parameters named exactly RangeStart and RangeEnd (case-sensitive, Date/Time type), then a filter on your date column using both of them. Get the equals sign on only ONE side — >= RangeStart and < RangeEnd is correct; putting = on both sides can double-count a row that lands exactly on a partition boundary.
A worked example
3 years of historical data, where only the last 10 days ever get corrected: set Archive data starting to 3 Years and Incrementally refresh data starting to 10 Days in the Incremental refresh policy dialog (right-click the table > Incremental refresh). Every scheduled refresh after the first one only reloads those last 10 days — the other ~3 years of partitions stay untouched.
Questions
Is this free?
Yes, completely free, no account or signup needed.
Does this work with an integer date key instead of a real date column?
Not directly — RangeStart/RangeEnd must be Date/Time parameters. If your date column is an integer surrogate key (like 20260615), you need a small conversion function in Power Query so the filter can still compare against it without breaking query folding.
What does "Only refresh complete days" do?
It skips refreshing a day's partition until that day has fully ended, so a refresh that runs mid-day doesn't load a partial day's worth of rows and then need to re-load it again once the day is actually complete.
Does incremental refresh require Premium or Fabric capacity?
No for the basic policy in Power BI Desktop and Pro workspaces -- it works on import-mode models generally. Some related options (like real-time DirectQuery hybrid tables) do need Premium/Fabric capacity.
This only produced the filter, not the RangeStart/RangeEnd parameters themselves -- why?
Power BI requires those two parameters to be created through its own Manage Parameters dialog (Date/Time type) -- they can't be pasted in as text. The setup steps above walk through creating them before pasting the filter.
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