There's no native Mac version of Power BI Desktop, though the community idea is Under Review (being considered) by the Power BI team. You could add your votes there. Until that happens, are you able to run Windows on your Mac and install it that way? Microsoft Power BI Desktop 2.58.5103.281 download page. Download PBIDesktop.msi free. Microsoft Power BI Desktop Size: 168.7Mb. Downloaded: 3,466 times. There's no native Mac version of Power BI Desktop, and we are not considering it to Mac anytime soon. W e do plan to bring more and more authoring capabilities from Power BI Desktop into the web experience. For your reference: Power BI for Mac. Power BI Desktop: This can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website. Power BI service: This is a cloud service in the MS cloud offerings and the point of the service is enabling and sharing collaboration. Power BI Mobile App: Lets you use Power BI on your mobile or tablets. It also allows you to do annotations and setting. Get free icons of Power bi in iOS, Material, Windows and other design styles for web, mobile, and graphic design projects. The free images are pixel perfect to fit your design and available in both png and vector. Download icons in all formats or edit them for your designs. As well, welcome to check new icons and popular icons.
Possibly my favourite Macbook ever is the trusty mid 2012 edition model. This portable and powerful unit is still very current, supporting Thunderbolt and USB 3, powerful processors, decent battery life, popular 13 inch size and upgradeable to 16Gb of memory, ideal for running Power BI Desktop…. except Power BI Desktop only runs on Windows… 🙁 . But wait, there’s more…
Microsoft’s beautiful and bold plan for Power BI is to enable this accessible Data tool within the reach of every Business User on the planet, and that means any device… So where is the Mac OS X version ?
Read on…
Power BI Desktop runs in several flavours :
Power BI Desktop – A Windows download that runs on a Windows desktop – 64 bit recommended.
Power BI Cloud – A brilliant zero infrastructure collaboration portal for sharing your concepts with colleagues or external service providers.
Power BI Mobile – Nifty and Pretty user friendly Mobile apps on IOS, Windows 10 Mobile and Android that allow you to roll out your concepts into live operational systems with Alerting and Notifications for easy and turnkey Management By Exception.
Power BI Embedded – a .Net deployed application that features your Power BI Cloud tiles incorporated into your own Application Seamlessly using Power BI backend APIs.
Power BI SharePoint – via some third party SharePoint apps.
Power BI On-Premise – yes, On-Premise, with a pricey Pyramid Analytics server from the company that collaborated with Microsoft to birth Power BI.
As for Power BI Desktop, we can run on Mac OS X in two ways :
- Create a virtual machine in Azure, install Power BI desktop there and access your Power BI cloud workstation via Mac OS X Remote Desktop apps like the sweet Remote Desktop app Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac.
- Install Parallels Desktop on your Mac, load up a Windows 10 ISO, install Windows, and load Power BI Desktop on this local virtual machine. Utilise Parallels Desktop to create a seamless Power BI Desktop experience by creating a user friendly shortcut that makes you think you are running Power BI Desktop as a native Mac OS X app.
Parallels has three flavours :
- Standard edition supporting up to 4 processors and 8gb of RAM
- Pro edition capable of more than 4 processors and up to 64Gb of RAM
- Business edition – Pro edition with Centralised Management capability
There are some other awesome features, like being able to spin up an Android or IOS virtual machine from a template, which is brilliant for demo-ing and testing Power BI mobile apps before rollout.
You can also install Parallels Access Agent allowing you to Remote Control your Mac over the internet.
But bring on the Mac OS X app please Microsoft 🙂
Power BI is a powerful BI tool, but it sadly doesn't support Mac devices.
A couple of years ago, I was working for a company where 90% of our staff had a MacBook and loved it, but there was no way for our Data Team to work with Power BI to build out reporting. Then we turned into another tool named Holistics, a cloud-based one.
In this post, I will share my experiences implementing Power BI on Mac OS, which I hope is helpful to you if you are looking for a solution.
Disclaimer: I fell in love with Holistics at the previous company, and am now working for Holistics!
Since Power BI can't run on a Mac, here are our recommendations to run Power BI on Macintosh Devices.
- Install and run Power BI on a Virtual Machine, then remote in to that Virtual Machine.
- Install and run Power BI on a PC, then use a remote viewer to control that PC.
- Use an alternative BI solution.
- Install Windows on Mac using Boot Camp
To give you a little context about Microsoft's plan on supporting Power BI on Mac devices, they are not considering developing Power BI desktop for Mac devices anytime soon.
You can also visit this link to keep track of their upcoming plans.
You can set-up a Windows Virtual Machine on Azure, Google Cloud or AWS.
- Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/ (starting from $61/month)
- AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/launch-windows-vm/
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Then you install and run Power BI on that Virtual Machine.
Finally, install Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac on each device to give your team access to that VM.
There are a couple of disadvantages to this approach, however:
- It's difficult to control permission access and version history.
- You can only have one person working on a machine at a time, since Power BI for desktop is not a collaborative tool.
It's a little bit the same with the first method, however, this time, you use a physical machine.
You set-up a Windows PC, install and run Power BI on that PC.
Install TeamViewer, AnyDesk, or MS Remote Desktop to give people access to that PC and use Power BI from their Macs.
Cons: same with the first method, and you have to maintain a physical PC.
Power BI is powerful — it helps your team consolidate data and build dashboards and reports with a powerful data modeling layer. It's not easy to find a great tool in the market to replace Power BI, but here are two alternative solutions I recommend which is 100% cloud-based, can replicate its functionalities, and in some cases do even more.
1. Holistics
Holistics is a powerful full-stack data platform that allows companies to set up an end-to-end, reusable, and scalable data analytics stack with minimal engineering resources.
It not only gives data analysts a powerful SQL-based data modeling approach, but it also helps them build a data warehouse and automate reporting. Holistics is also designed to empowers non-technical users to get insights with a strong self-service analytics offering.
Holistics vs Power BI: https://www.holistics.io/compare/holistics-vs-powerbi/
2. Looker + StitchData
Looker is a business intelligence and big data analytics platform that helps you explore, analyze and share real-time business analytics easily.
Looker is also a powerful server-based Data Modeling BI tool, however, they don't support Data Transforms and Data Imports, so you will need another tool for that called StitchData. Together, you get all the power of Power BI with none of the Windows lock-in.
Boot Camp is a utility that helps you install Microsoft Windows 10 on your Mac, then switch between macOS and Windows when restarting your Mac.
You can learn more about how to use it here
I like Power BI's product, but it is difficult to keep using Power BI given that the tool is built exclusively for the Windows Desktop. Instead of allowing your data team to work collaboratively, your data pipeline will depend on Windows. This is difficult and restrictive if your organization works primarily on Mac.
Power Bi Desktop For Mac Free Downloads
The upshot here is that if you do not use a Microsoft-stack at your organization, a 100% cloud-based solution would be a better fit for your needs.