How to use A SKU’s to try out Paginated Reports in Power BI without upfront cost or long term commitment

Since the Eagles game doesn’t start until later, thought I’d put this together for folks.

As many of you know, earlier this month we announced a preview of Paginated Reports in Power BI.  While folks were excited about this, there were those who were disappointed it was only available (for now) if you had Power BI Premium.

“I don’t have Premium (yet . . .),” they said,  “But I still want to try this out and use it.  How can I do so without committing to it for a month and paying $5000?”

The good news is, there is an easy way to do this.  See, as I’ve stated in previous interviews, you can try all the functionality out by spinning up an Power BI Embedded A SKU capacity, which is available to purchase through Microsoft Azure.  While normally A SKU’s are specifically used for embedding scenarios, there is no licensing restriction against using them internally if you’d like.  However, generally this makes little sense vs. purchasing a P SKU for most use cases, since each user would still need a Pro license to access the Power BI portal AND it’s almost $1000 more per month if you run it all the time.

But if you just want to try out the new functionality that is available only on Premium capacity, the big advantage of A SKU’s is you can stop/start them just like any VM in Azure, and you’re billed by the minute vs. having an initial upfront monthly cost.  This means you can spin up an A SKU, turn on the paginated reports capability in your Power BI portal, and start using it.  And when you’re done, you can go into Azure and pause the capacity until you want to use it again.  Since you’re only billed for the time it’s running, you can try this new functionality out for around 14 cents a minute! (this figure is based on my fuzzy math being done while my son is playing Fortnite right next to me, so forgive me if this is off by a few cents one way or another).  Let’s walk through how you’d go set this up yourself –

I have my own Power BI subscription (yes, I pay out of pocket for this), since I like to have access to the exact same experience as all of my users do (or I forgot to turn it off when I joined the team . . .).  In any event, I have a Pro license, but when I check the Admin Portal, I can see I have no Premium capacities right now.

Note another tab there which says “Power BI Embedded” – I don’t have any of those capacities, which you purchase in Azure, spun up currently either.

To get one of those going, I’m going to head to the Azure Portal and login with my credentials that I also use for Power BI.  Why? Because I’m the only user, so I’m also the admin.  Now, I can do a search for “Power BI Embedded”.  This will take me to the management page, which looks like this

I hit the “Create Power BI Embedded” button, which, if you haven’t signed up for an Azure account yet, you’ll be prompted to do so, and this includes a $200 credit for 30 days.  If you have signed up for Azure, you will skip this step (duh).

Now that I have that setup, I’ll go back to the portal and get back to the previous screen.  Here, I can click the button again to setup a new Power BI Embedded A SKU.  You need to select at least an A4 capacity size or higher to use Paginated Reports, so I’ll pick an A4 in my home location to spin up.  (NOTE: Paginated Reports are also supported in multi-geo scenarios, even during our public preview, so I could choose other regions outside my home region if I wanted to.)

Everything looks good, so I’ll hit create and wait for it to finish deploying.

If I check my Power BI Portal, I see that it is also showing as being deployed there under the Capacity Settings –> Power BI Embedded tab

Once it’s completed deployment, when I click on the capacity name, I’ll see I can manage this capacity just like I would any premium capacity in Power BI.

Under the Workloads, I see the two new preview workloads, and I’ll set Paginated Reports to “On” and assign 50% of the memory to that workload.  I can also try out the new Dataflows workload as well, but I’ll save that for another time.

After a few moments, I’ll see the message has changed from starting to Ready, and my workload is now ready to use.  I’ll assign all (one) of the workspaces for my organization to this new capacity.

Cool!  Now, I can upload my first paginated report to the workspace and view it.  I’m using a vintage Halo sample report, and it renders without a hitch.

But now I want to stop using the capacity and not get charged (since I finished this blog post).  No problem – I can go back to the Azure portal and just pause the capacity until I want to use it again.

When I’ve paused it, I can no longer view my paginated reports in Power BI, but they aren’t deleted or otherwise affected.  They’re still there waiting to be used again when the capacity is started up, and I can delete them if I need to.

And that’s it – in less than an hour, including the time it took to type this blogpost, I created a new Azure subscription, created my first Power BI “Embedded” A4 capacity, turned on the Paginated Report workload, assigned a workspace, uploaded and viewed my report, and then paused the capacity to stop the billing on it.  Whew!

Thanks so much for reading through the post today, and I hope you all take some time to try out the new paginated reports in Power BI Premium.  And if your organization doesn’t already have Power BI Premium, use this walkthrough to give it a try yourself!

Happy Thanksgiving (week)!