Power BI to users without Power BI

Phil Collins picture Phil Collins · Nov 26, 2018 · Viewed 9.1k times · Source

So I've asked a similar question, but I thought I'd ask it more generally to get as many ideas as possible.

I have Power BI Pro. I am tasked with creating reports for hundreds of recipients, each one personalized to that specific user.

My organization will not pay out for everyone else to have Power BI enabled, although everyone will have an O365 account.

How do I share my reports created in Power BI to users without Power BI? Factoring in there are several hundred of them to produce every week by a team of 2 people.

Thanks in advance!

Answer

Nick.McDermaid picture Nick.McDermaid · Nov 26, 2018

Right here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-how-to-collaborate-distribute-dashboards-reports

it says

You need a Power BI Pro license to share your content, and those you share it with do too, or the content needs to be in a workspace in a Premium capacity.

But you can always just share the .pbix file locally. This doesn't use PowerBI.Com at all so you can do what you want. You should just be aware that you won't get a lot of the features like security etc.

That's the licencing terms of using Power BI. No way around it. Anything that works around this violates licencing.

Going by your other question.... you don't even need Power BI - you just want a bunch of static PDF's split by department! There are many ways to build a low cost reporting solution that spawns out PDF's, for example SSRS.

Everyone thinks Power BI is perfect for everything. It's not!! Think outside the square!