• Free Power Bi Desktop Download
• Power Bi Desktop For Mac Free Download Cnet

Power BI is the leader of the pack when it comes to Business Intelligence tools. It has several different licence types, depending on how users want to use and interact with it.

• Microsoft Power BI Desktop is a companion desktop application to Power BI. With Power BI Desktop, you can: Get data The Power BI Desktop makes discovering data easy. You can import data from a wide variety of data sources. After you connect to a data source, you can shape the data to match your analysis and reporting needs.
• There's no native Mac version of Power BI Desktop, though the community idea is Under Review (being considered) by the Power BI team. You could add your votes there. Until that happens, are you able to run Windows on your Mac and install it that way?
• Power BI Desktop is a free application that lets you monitor key data and create interactive data visualizations and reports. Capture and Transform Data Microsoft’s Power BI productivity suite comes in three products, the cloud-based service Power BI, the Power BI Desktop, and the Power BI Mobile.
• Choose the BI Publisher Desktop based on your version of Microsoft Office 32 bit or 64 bit Sample Audit & Usage Reports Sample reports to view Audit table data for BI Publisher Reports, Catalog Objects and to get insight on Report Usage.

If you’re thinking about using Power BI business analytics tools to deliver insights throughout your organisation, or if you’ve been provided a licence by your company, you’ll need to understand what these licences are, how they work and what facilities each offer.

The most popular Mac alternative is Tableau. It's not free, so if you're looking for a free alternative, you could try PopSQL or Marple. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 100 alternatives to Microsoft Power BI and many of them are available for Mac so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement.

Update: In December 2020 Microsoft Announced their new 'Premium Per User' Licence I've written about it here Power BI Licences, what is Premium Per User ?

Update: We cover licencing in our Youtube Video,

Comparison table

Our in depth look at each shows exactly how they differ and will help you make the right decision:

Power BI desktop – free software

Before getting in to licence detail, it’s worth mentioning one element of Power BI that does not need a licence. The Power BI desktop application is a free download from Microsoft, you can get it here.

Power BI Desktop lets you create Data Models and build Reports, but does not need a Power BI licence. However, once you’ve built your Report, in order to share it with others, export it to PowerPoint or simply print the Report you’ll need a Power BI account in the cloud. To access Power BI in the cloud you’ll need a licence, either Free or Pro.

Power BI Free Licence

The Power BI Free licence is the entry-level licence for Power BI. Users can sign up for one simply by registering here. A Power BI Free licence gives the user 10GB of storage in the cloud that can be used for hosting Power BI reports, or Excel workbooks.

The maximum size of a Power BI report that can be hosted in the cloud is 1GB. These reports can be refreshed up to 8 times a day, with a minimum of 30 minutes between each refresh.

Power BI Free Limitations

Although powerful, the Power BI free licence has several limitations. The most obvious is that Free licences cannot share Reports or Dashboards with other users, neither can they view Reports or Dashboards shared from other Pro licence users.

The only method of sharing a Report open to Free licence users is to publish the Report to the Web. This makes the report publicly available on app.powerbi.com. This publish to web is great for sharing reports with everybody on the internet, but remember it’s not secure and should not be used for data you don’t want to make public, which is pretty much any corporate data, which should be kept confidential.

Other limitations mean you cannot integrate with Office 365 or export reports to PowerPoint or report data to CSV’s.

Best for

• Small businesses and start-ups
• Businesses with less data to analyse
• Businesses without a budget for intelligence tools

Power BI Pro

The Pro licence is a chargeable, per user licence which is currently £7.50 per user per month. It is usually bought as a standalone or add-on licence to office 365. The office 365 E5 licence is the only office 365 licence that includes a Power BI Pro licence as part of it, all others need an add-on licence.

A Pro licence has all the feature of the free licence, 10GB of storage, maximum 1GB report size, 8 automated refreshes per day, with a minimum 30 minutes between refreshes etc. But the big difference is that Pro users can share Reports and Dashboards with other Pro users.

Pro licence holders can also integrate with Office 365 Groups and Teams, use collaborative workspaces and set up email subscriptions to Reports and Dashboards. Often called a “Creator” or “Author” licence, the Pro licence is the most common Power BI licence and in small to medium sized enterprises is it common to have a Pro licence for each user that wants to use Power BI.

Best for

• Medium to larger businesses
• Corporations with big data
• Multi-site businesses

Power BI Premium

The Power BI Premium licence is not a per-user licence like a Free or Pro Licence. Instead a Premium licence provides a dedicated capacity for all users in the organisation. This dedicated capacity, a “Premium Workspace” can be used to host large datasets, up to 50GB in size and offers a total of 100TB of data storage.

It allows Reports and Dashboards to be wrapped up in an “app” and shared with users. These users then only need a free licence to view the app. It also allows Reports and Dashboards on a Premium Workspace to be shared with users having a free licence.

Multiple workspaces can be marked as “Premium” and each can be use to create apps or share with free licence users. A Power BI Premium licence is very much a “consumer” licence, allowing users with only a free licence the ability to view and interact with Reports and Dashboards hosted on a Premium workspace. To create these reports and dashboards in the first place you need a “Pro” licence.

How do you know what Licence you have?

If you want to know what licence you have for Power BI, from your Power BI Workspace on the web, click on the “Gearwheel” on the menu top right. From there click on “Manage Personal Storage” Power BI will show your login name and the licence type at the top of the screen.

To find out if you have a Premium licence, look at the Workspaces available to you. Premium workspaces have a diamond icon next to them. Alternatively, when creating a Workspace you can designate it as “Dedicated Capacity”, which is only available with a Premium licence.

Figure 1 Diamond Icon signifying Premium Workspace

Things to note

• There is no anonymous secure viewer for Power BI, if you publish a report to the Web, it is made public, and anyone on the internet can potentially search and find the data. Try putting “site:app.powerbi.com burningsuit” into google to find our public reports, or worse still try “site:app.powerbi.com confidential”!
• To securely share a Report, a Pro user can share with another Pro user, or place the Report on a Premium Workspace and share it with Free licence users.
• Emailing Power BI Desktop files around is not secure, the recipient gets ALL the data in the data model and can edit the resulting report. Of course, the recipient also needs a copy of PowerBI Desktop to open the .pbix file.
• When you first sign up for Power BI free you have the option of trialling a Pro licence for 30 days without charge.
• Internal Administrators can block signup to Power BI Free or Pro, so that they can administer the licences for the organisation.

Training for all versions

Whether you choose to go with the free or pro version of Power BI, or update to premium, we can help you get the most out of it for your business in our ​Power BI Training courses.​

Our team of experts are at the cutting edge of all things Power BI, due to our close partnership with Microsoft, giving you the most up-to-date training and information of the platform.

Get in contact with our expert team to find out more or, visit our Power BI page to book your place on one of our courses.

Whether you’re on the go or need to create rich, interactive reports, download the tools you need to build reports and stay connected to your data from anywhere, anytime. Get a 360° view of your business data on the go—at the touch of your fingers—and quickly connect, shape, visualize, and share data insights through Power BI.

With the Power BI Desktop you can visually explore your data through a free-form drag-and-drop canvas, a broad range of modern data visualizations, and an easy-to-use report authoring experience.

Access your data anywhere, anytime. These native apps provide live, interactive, mobile access to your important business information.

Keep your dashboards and reports up to date by connecting to your on-premises data sources—without the need to move the data.

Deploy and distribute interactive Power BI reports—and traditional paginated reports—within the boundaries of your organization’s firewall.

Create pixel-perfect paginated reports for printing or electronic distribution with a familiar experience relied on by thousands of report authors.

Free Power Bi Desktop Download

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