Export to File for Power BI Reports

[LuukP]

Hi all,

I attended the MPPC conference in Vegas two weeks ago, and was excited about the "Export to File for Power BI Reports" functionality in Power Automate.  Unfortunately, it does not seem to work with our licensing.  I am using the Power BI Premium Per User license with a Premium Per-User workspace.  When I try to use it, I get the following error:

I'm finding this very frustrating (and can tell from posts from 2020 that I am not alone).  This seems like fairly basic functionality and I don't understand why we would have to pay thousands of dollars per month to get something so basic working.

How can I (or we as a community) get Microsoft to enable some of this simple functionality without having to go Premium?  I would like to be able to test this as a proof-of-concept at a minimum...

Thanks!

[edhans · Accepted solution]

It requires premium because you can really consume a ton of resources if you were to generate files for a number of different reports and users. MS cannot bear that processing cost as a single PPU license could be used to generate thousands of pages a week, or even a day, and emailed to dozens of users, even those that have no Power BI license.

With Premium, you are renting the entire capacity, and 100% of your users can use the Power BI Free license. You do whatever you want to do with it. If you want to turn it into a report bursting canon, that is up to you. 

But it makes no financial sense for that to happen on the shared capacities of Pro and PPU. It is one of the few things that PPU cannot do that Premium can, and financially, it makes sense it is set up that way.

[LuukP · Accepted solution]

It turns out that I was the problem...

Given that I have Power BI Premium-Per-User and a Fabric trial set up, I missed the step of assigning my Workspace to the Trial Capacity (Power BI -> Admin Portal -> Workspaces -> select the workspace, click the elipses and select "Reassign Workspace" -> Select Trial

My workflow now sends me the image of the Power BI report I wanted.

Thanks,

Luuk

[edhans]

Cool. I was going to ask you about that when I saw your reply come through. Glad you have a solution working.

[LuukP]

So, now I have another question - which I'm happy to post as a new topic - but off-hand, I am trying now to only convert one visual to a .png file.  I've used the "name" for the visual from the JSON file in the .PBIX, but that doesn't seem to be working.  Is this part actually a working feature?

[edhans]

That would be a better question for the Power Automate forum, as now you are getting into details of the component of the Flow. Microsoft Power Automate Community - Power Platform Community

[edhans · Accepted solution]

It requires premium because you can really consume a ton of resources if you were to generate files for a number of different reports and users. MS cannot bear that processing cost as a single PPU license could be used to generate thousands of pages a week, or even a day, and emailed to dozens of users, even those that have no Power BI license.

With Premium, you are renting the entire capacity, and 100% of your users can use the Power BI Free license. You do whatever you want to do with it. If you want to turn it into a report bursting canon, that is up to you. 

But it makes no financial sense for that to happen on the shared capacities of Pro and PPU. It is one of the few things that PPU cannot do that Premium can, and financially, it makes sense it is set up that way.

[LuukP]

Thanks @edhans!

That does make sense, and I appreciate your input.

I just wonder if there is a way to scale Premium for smaller businesses.

For example, I would have at most 20-30 users that would actually use this functionality a few times a month, which I don't feel would require much storage (each image of a Power BI report has to be less than 25Kb as I understand it).  So, perhaps one option for Microsoft might be to be able to use this connector to save the file as a blob to SharePoint, which we do already pay for?

I honestly don't mind paying for storage or processing - but I doubt I'd need more than a GB per month (or even a year) for generating the images, and that's where the cost of Power BI Premium is simply too prohibitive.

For now, I'll live with it.  I just thought it was super-cool functionality and had hoped it would be something I could at least demo to my management.

Kind regards,

Luuk

[edhans]

I think a new Fabric capacity might be a possibility. The lowest capacties are just a few hundred a month and that is if you leave them on all of the time. You can turn them off. I am honestly not sure what what level you need to allow for bursting like you want, but it is worth spinning up a F capactity in trial mode during the preview to test.

[LuukP]

@edhans - thanks for the reply.

I do currently have the Fabric trial running, as well as Power BI Premium-Per-User.  I have Azure Blob Storage running, and have created basic flows that will respond to a keyword in Teams to pull an image from it.  What is not working - per my original post - is the Export to File for Power BI Reports.  I had hoped that I had checked all the boxes to at least try it out - but perhaps I am still missing something?