What Power BI Is: Desktop, Service, Mobile, Licences

Facts in this lesson come from Microsoft Learn and the Microsoft Power BI pricing page, read on 2026-10-20. Nothing in this lesson is a preview feature.

You already know Excel. You can type data into a workbook, build a chart and email the file to a colleague. Power BI follows the same pattern of build, share, view. The difference is that each stage has its own tool, and your licence decides who can see your work. This lesson gives you that map before you install anything.

The course project

Over 18 levels you will build one report from a small sales dataset. Here is a first look at it. You will load it properly in Level 3.

Do now: read the table and answer one question: "Which region sold the most revenue?" The answer is North, with £560. By the end of the course a Power BI visual will answer that question for you, and it will update itself when the data changes.

Step 1: Know the three parts of Power BI

Power BI has three main parts. Each one does a different job.

1. Power BI Desktop is where you build. It is a free Windows application, and it needs Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 or later. In Desktop you connect to data such as Excel and CSV files, clean the data with the Power Query Editor, create relationships and calculations, and design report pages with visuals. Your work is saved as a .pbix file. In Excel terms, Desktop is your workbook, where all the creative work happens.
2. The Power BI service (app.powerbi.com) is where you publish and share. It is a cloud platform that you use in a web browser. You publish a report from Desktop into a workspace, a shared online folder. From there you share it, schedule data refresh and set up subscriptions and alerts. In Excel terms, the service is like putting the workbook on SharePoint, except people get an interactive report and not a file they can break.
3. Power BI Mobile apps are where people view reports on the go. They are built for phones and tablets. They are for viewing and interacting with reports, not for building them.

Step 2: Follow a report's journey

Every report in this course moves through the same order:

1. Build in Power BI Desktop: get the data, clean it, model it and design the visuals.
2. Publish from Desktop to a workspace in the Power BI service.
3. Share from the service with colleagues.
4. View in a web browser or in the mobile app.

Do now: write these four words on a sticky note: Build → Publish → Share → View. Each later level fits somewhere on this line.

Step 3: Understand the per-user licences

A licence decides what you can do in the service. Building in Desktop is free. Licences matter once you want other people to see your work. There are three per-user licences:

• Free (shown as "Fabric (Free)"): you can create reports and dashboards for your own use only. You cannot share or collaborate with other people, and you cannot publish to other people's workspaces. Think of it as a private notebook.
• Power BI Pro ($14.00 per user per month, paid yearly, US list price): you can publish to shared workspaces, share content and collaborate with other Pro users. Pro is included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5.
• Premium Per User (PPU) ($24.00 per user per month, paid yearly, US list price): you get everything in Pro plus most Premium features, such as larger models and more frequent refreshes. The catch: content in a PPU workspace can only be shared with people who also have PPU.

In a normal (shared-capacity) workspace, everyone involved needs a matching paid licence: Pro shares with Pro, and PPU shares with PPU.

Step 4: Understand capacity licences

A capacity is computing power that an organisation buys for its workspaces. It is a separate thing from a per-user licence.

• Fabric capacity (F SKUs): the current way to buy capacity. It is billed through Azure, either pay-as-you-go or as a reservation, and it can be paused.
• Power BI Premium capacity (P SKUs): the older way. Microsoft no longer sells new P SKUs, and existing subscriptions end at the end of their current agreement term.

The key rule: when a workspace is on Power BI Premium capacity or Fabric F64 or larger, Pro and PPU users can share its content with colleagues who have only a Free licence. Those Free users can then view and interact with it. Smaller F SKUs, such as F2 to F32, do not give Free users this viewing right.

Only Pro or PPU users can create content in capacity workspaces. Free users can only view it there.

Step 5: Check your understanding

Use this scenario. You build the sales report and want three colleagues to see it:

Do now: cover the last column and work out each answer yourself, then compare. If you got all three right, you understand the licence rules for this course.

Key takeaways

• Desktop builds, the service publishes and shares, Mobile views. The order is Build → Publish → Share → View.
• Power BI Desktop is free and runs on Windows.
• Free licence: personal use only, with no sharing.
• Pro shares with other Pro users. PPU shares with other PPU users.
• Viewers with a Free licence can open shared content only when the workspace is on Premium capacity or Fabric F64 or larger.
• New capacity is bought as Fabric F SKUs. Microsoft no longer sells Premium P SKUs.