Power BI has already proven its essentiality for the business world. Mastering the use of Power BI is now almost as necessary as knowing how to use Excel. Power BI is a Microsoft solution focused on database analysis. It allows you to create reports and dashboards, and even share them with other people in your organization, thus contributing to data analysis and decision making.
Throughout it you can centralize a large volume of data in a single repository, facilitating its practical and efficient management. It is also possible to achieve high levels of analysis through visually friendly reports (using automatic charts and tables), in addition to obtaining various indicators and metrics that help consolidate intelligent decision making.
There are currently 4 online subscriptions types for Power BI and we will explore them below.
Power BI free, as the name clearly indicates, it's a free subscription for Power BI, that allows you to do lots of similar things to the paid one, but it has some limitations that we will be exploring here.
Even being free, you will still have to assign a license to the user who will be using Power BI, otherwise they will not be able to operate on in. It´s an unlimited license that you can assign to everyone without cost.
The free subscription allows you to use the Power BI Desktop version, which is the necessary application to connect to your data and start creating dashboards and reports. There are more than 130 types of sources that you can connect to Power BI to retrieve information from, and you are enabled to use all connectors available.
You can work with this data locally or, if it's necessary, you can publish the reports in "My Workspace" and use Power BI Service or Power BI Mobile.
One thing that it’s important to know, is that with the free subscription only the user who publishes the report in “My Workspace”, is allowed to see it.
The only possible way to share a report with the free subscription, is by publishing it to web (Public), but then anyone would be able to see your report.
Even though Power BI Free has its potentialities, there are some limitations: