Install Power BI Desktop

This is part 1 of the series “Send Power BI Report in Email using Power Automate“. In this post, we will learn what Power BI is and what are its license types. At last, we will be installing Power BI Desktop on our system.

Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft. It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards.

Microsoft Power BI Desktop is built for the analyst. It combines state-of-the-art interactive visualizations, with industry-leading data query and modeling built-in. Create and publish your reports to Power BI. Power BI Desktop helps you empower others with timely critical insights, anytime, anywhere.

Power BI Desktop is totally free to download. If you want to publish your reports to Power BI service, you would need to sign in. Create a free account here.

There are two license types for Power BI –

Power BI (free)
Power BI Pro

Power BI (free)

You would have access to content in your own default workspace – My Workspace.
You can consume content shared by others from Pro license users.
You cannot share your reports with others with free license.

Power BI Pro

Publish content to other workspaces, share dashboards, subscribe to dashboards and reports, share with users who have a Pro license
Distribute content to users who have free licenses

There is one more license Power BI Premium which has additional dedicated capacity. To know the difference between the Power BI Pro and Premium licenses and its pricing, refer here.

Download and Install Power BI Desktop

Go to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/ and click on download.

It will try to open Microsoft Store to get the Power BI Desktop available there. Click on Open.

Click on Install.

Open Power BI Desktop, login to your account and start creating your reports. For using Power BI Desktop, login is not required, but if you are publishing your reports, it is necessary. In the next parts, we will create a simple report and publish it in the Power BI Service.