Power BI 1: How To Get PowerBI
Power BI Tiers, How to setup Power BI, App Exploration, How it fits into the broader industry
Thank you to BowTied_Analyst for helping out with the PowerBI series.
Today is all about setting up Power BI. We’ll talk about the different tiers of Power BI, how to set up Power BI and activate a free trial of Power BI Premium through Microsoft Fabric. I will also show you how to set up Power BI without using a work or school email. We will also cover the Power BI training offered by Microsoft and how to fit it into your learning strategy.
This is a longer article. It will take some time to work your way through it, especially if you don’t have a work/school email address to use to sign up for Power BI.
Power BI Tiers
There are three tiers of Power BI available through the Power BI App. The available size of a model increases with each tier as does the amount of daily refreshes available to you. As you go up in tiers there are also a couple additional features available. The tiers are:
Free
Pro
Premium
Free has everything that you need. You can trial out Power BI Premium for 60 days at no cost, but for the purpose of learning, Free has everything you need. Premium allows you to share workspaces, use dataflows and do a few other things. Pro allows you to share workspaces. If you’re freelancing, you can get away with just having Pro for $10 per month.
From pro to premium, you get the ability to use dataflows which allows you to better compartmentalize data. There are a couple of other new features as well, Power BI’s Advanced AI isn’t great. Any AI/Machine Learning I do is done on the front end with Power BI connecting into the resultant database or flat file. Datamarts and XMLA endpoint read/write are useful but are beyond the scope of this post. More in-depth discussion of different tiers of Power BI is available on the Microsoft Website.
The App is only part of the product, Power BI Desktop is where I like to create and build. Power BI Desktop is available for download from the Microsoft store after you have signed up/set up the Power BI App.
How to Set Up Power BI
The first thing you need to do is go to app.powerbi.com. Power BI will now prompt you for your email. You need an email account to access Power BI. Specifically you need a WORK email or a SCHOOL email to access Power BI. A personal will not work. Gmail does not work. Protonmail does not work. If you have a work email or a school email that you don't mind using, enter it in and follow the prompts. You can also skip down below to watch me follow them.
So what if for whatever reason you don't have a work or school email account? Well things get a little more complicated but signing up for Power BI is still doable, we just have to be creative. What we're going to do is spoof a non-personal email address. This was relatively easy when I first started working in Power BI (non-professionally), now it requires a little more ingenuity.
Creating a Dummy Email to Set up Power BI
The solution to the problem is to trial a Microsoft 365 Developer Account. Use your admin email address from your Microsoft 365 E5 configurable sandbox. This works as of December 2023, I cannot promise that Microsoft won't change things so that this no longer works in the future. You will need an email address and a phone number. I used a protonmail burner and a random google voice account I had. Here's how we do that:
Follow the link, click join now and then create an account.
Enter in your personal email, or create a burner on Protonmail.
Use your phone to enter the code and verify that you are real.
Answer some questions from the Developer Program re: geography/company/language.
Fill out you want to be working on, I selected all the Microsoft software but set my purpose to “personal project”
Navigate To Your Developer Dashboard
In your developer dashboard, you will have a dummy domain name from which to experiment in the developer environment. There is an associated admin email address can be used to activate an instance of Power BI. The structure of this email address is name_you_entered@xxxx.onmicrosoft.com (or you can check the image above). Once activated, so long as you remember your email/password, Power BI will work for you.
Power BI Setup, Part 2
Enter you non-personal email address (work, school, or developer admin) into the Power BI website and follow the prompts. You will also need a telephone number for verification. You will need access to this telephone number for 2FA for logging into Power BI or you can set up Microsoft Authenticator.
Congratulations, you now have access to the “free” tier of Power BI!
You can see account information by clicking on the icon in the top right corner of the screen. You can see my email address as well as the option to start a free 60 day trial of Microsoft Fabric. This is new, as before the trial was for Power BI Pro. The Microsoft Fabric Trial includes ALL features available for Power BI premium. I would not activate this immediately as activating it later will allow you to experiment with other more advanced aspects of Power BI and the Fabric platform.
As an aside, I deleted my Microsoft dev account but my login still works for Power BI. I believe that so long as I don’t need the email account to reset a password, I will have access to Power BI through this account. I’ll periodically check the account I set up for this tutorial, but its been over a week and my Power BI account is still active and working.
Power BI App Exploration
We’re going to explore the Power BI App for a little bit before getting Power BI Desktop. On the left side of the Power BI App you have your toolbar. I’m going to call out two icons on this toolbar, the “Learn” icon which brings you to the learning center.
The learning center has links out to Power BI training, the documentation and the Power BI forum. You also have access to some of Microsoft’s pre-built Dashboards if you want to explore setup and/or design strategies.
Setting Up Power BI Desktop
With the launch of Fabric, Power BI data sets are now called “semantic models.” You can build reports off of pre-built semantic models in the Power BI App but you need Power BI desktop to build your own semantic models, which is a huge part of Power BI development. Building a semantic model consists of connecting to datasources, using power query to clean your data and building a data model in Power BI. I will cover each of these topics later.
Follow this link which will take you to the Desktop website and click download free at the top.
The Microsoft store will launch, click get.
One Power BI Desktop is downloaded, log in with your email/password.
This is the home screen of a fresh report for Power BI Desktop. This screen is where we’ll start with the next post, which will be about adding data do Power BI.
How Does Power BI Fit into the Broader Data Industry?
After this post, I’ll be getting into the technical aspects of Power BI. Power BI and other Analytics software exists to ease people into good data practices and so a lot of the functions in Power BI are comparable to functions you can do with code as a data scientist. When you’re building a mental model of Power BI and how it interacts with other aspects “data industry” its good to plug it into broader themes.
A lot of Power Query functions can also be done with Python or R when you’re cleaning your data.
Building a data model is Power BI’s version of data engineering and is related to primary/foreign keys and normalization.
Building visualizations is related to using Matplotlib/Seaborn to create visualizations in Python.
I’ll try to call these out as they arise so that you can build a better mental model of Power BI and how it fits in with everything else.
Power BI Learning Strategies
This series will show you the basics of Power BI, just get your feet wet. Something to keep in mind while learning is that the best way to hold on to unfamiliar concepts is to apply them. When I learned how to use Power BI I did the free Data Analyst Microsoft Training. Its great training, it walks you through a lot of the basics through reading the documentation, little quizzes and labs. Here’s the thing though, I promptly forgot everything that I learned because I did not apply it immediately. I had to do the training again a couple months later as I was building out a Power BI dashboard for a job.
The key to learning Power BI is to have your own project that you are working on in tandem with the training and applying the training to your own data as you go through it. Especially with technical aspects of report development, like Power Query, Data Modeling and DAX. It’s great that you are reading this series (and hopefully doing some other training too). But after this post, it’s as important to have a project and be applying what you are learning, as you are learning it. Take time to digest the information. After that, play around with the functionality outside of the “safe” sandbox mode of Microsoft Labs.