by Wyn Hopkins

Setting up a free Personal Power BI / Fabric Account

 

Do you want to try out the Power BI / Fabric Service (PowerBI.com) or share your portfolio of reports with potential new employers?

If you have a PowerBI.com account then you can use the Publish to Web option to share your reports, but signing up for Power BI / Fabric requires a “work” account.

I’d previously blogged here about using the rolling Developer Trial but that has been suspended and now requires a paid Visual Studio subscription.

These are the 3 ways I’m aware of now:

  1. Buy a cheap domain via from https://www.uk2.net/ or similar domain provider and then use the email account of that domain to sign up
  2. Create a free 365 E3 trial (requires a credit card) and then sign in to Power BI  with the new email.  According to this Microsoft Learn Article your Power BI trial will continue once you cancel your 365 trial.
    Cancel via https://admin.cloud.microsoft/?#/subscriptions
  3. Sign up for a free azure portal (requires a credit card) via  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free and during this process create a free xyz.microsoft.com account – then create a new user on this tenant and sign in via Power BI Sign in.

Publish To Web

Once you’ve signed up to PowerBI.com you’ll need to go to the Power BI / Fabric admin portal and enable publish to web.

 

Then you can go to any report in My Workspace and click File – Embed – Publish to Web to share you report for free to the world.  This process is unsecure so anyone can potentially see it.