Guide To Install Power BI

The Power BI demand has raised significantly in recent times due to its amazing features and acceptance by the data visualization professionals/business intelligence teams. Due to this exponentially increasing trend, people are more interested in knowing how to install Power BI on a system. We will see installation steps further in this article, but before that let’s check out the recent trends on the rising popularity of Power BI: 

Power BI Dashboard 

Below is the screenshot of the Power BI dashboard. This is how the dashboard looks after converting data from different data sources with the help of Power BI, a data visualization and Business Intelligence tool. 

System Requirements for installing Power BI 

The prerequisite system requirements  for installing Power BI desktop version on your machine:

1. The OS requirement for Power BI is as follows: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Window server 2016, Window server 2019
2. The minimum IE version required is IE10
3. The minimum .net version required is 4.6
4. Hard Disk- At least 1 GB space is required to install the Power BI server and additional space is required to host Power BI database.
5. RAM- Minimum: 1 GB and Recommendation: 4 GB or more
6. Processor speed-Minimum x64 1.4GHz Recommended 2GHz or faster
7. Processor - x64 Processor: AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon 64, Intel Xeon with Intel EM64T support, Intel Pentium IV with EM64T support

As we know that Power BI has two different variants so let us cover the installation of both variants separately. First, we will cover the scenario where the organization has already office 365 subscription  :

1. The Power BI web client using Office 365- This version is used for connecting to Microsoft cloud. Let's go through step by step for using the same if we have already an office 365 subscription.

• In IE browser, navigate to Power BI Getting started link and click on “Sign in “ link which is available at the top right of the page :

• Next step is to log in with the organization’s office 365 account credentials:

• IIn case your office 365 access has not been activated for Power BI then you would see below screen:

2. Downloading the desktop version of Power BI 

• Navigate to the Power BI download page for downloading the desktop version of Power BI.Power BI Download

• Clicking on download free  will take us to Microsoft store from where we can get a copy of Power BI desktop version

• Clicking on Get will ask for confirmation if we would sign in with Microsoft account to use the desktop version on all compatible devices. After confirmation downloading will start and once download gets completed, we can launch a window installer.

• Once Power BI is installed, we can log in with office 365 account

Now let us cover standalone Power BI desktop installation if we do not have pro Office 365 subscriptions. Please find below steps for the same : 

• Let first navigate to download page  Power BI.  Then we can select the language in which you would like to  install Power BI

• We can also directly navigate to download page by visiting the direct link  as well :

Download files Power BI .We can select the appropriate file based on the OS type. There are two variants of the file available, one is 32 bit and the other is 64 bit. We can download the correct file. 

• After running the downloaded installer(assume we have downloaded 64-bit version) we come across below screen where we can follow the instructions to install Power BI :

• After successful installation,  the welcome screen is launched which provides options to connect to data existing data models enrichment, creating new reports and publishing.

Uninstall Power BI Desktop: 

1. On the start menu, go to control panels.
2. In control panels section ,click Add/Remove Program
3. Then select Microsoft Power BI Desktop in the program list and click uninstall option.

Power BI on Mac:  

There is no support available to run Power BI on Mac. But if we have Azure subscription then we can provision windows VM and install Power BI there. Once VM is configured, it is easy to remotely access VM from Mac machines.