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Power BI Licensing: Free vs Pro vs PPU vs Fabric
Four licence types, one decision. What Free cannot do, when Pro is enough, and the headcount where Fabric capacity beats per-user pricing.
Category
Power BI Service
Workspaces, gateways, deployment, and administration.
3 tutorials in this category
Everything up to this point happens on one machine, in Desktop. The service is where a report becomes something other people depend on: scheduled refresh through a gateway, row-level security that decides who sees which rows, workspaces that separate build from publish, and capacity that determines whether the thing stays fast at 9am on a Monday.
Begin with the service-versus-desktop overview and incremental refresh, then read row-level security — including the dynamic version, since a static role rarely survives contact with real users. Dataflows and deployment pipelines come next, and only after that the capacity and licensing decisions, which are much easier to make once you know how the model will actually be refreshed and shared.
The two assumptions that cause the most trouble are that a .pbix file can be shared like a spreadsheet, and that a refresh that works in Desktop will work in the service. Neither survives the first week. Credentials, gateway placement and the source's own timeouts live outside the file, and they are the reasons most scheduled refreshes fail.
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Scheduled Refresh Failed: Seven Causes and the Fix
Your refresh worked yesterday. Seven reasons it stopped, in the order worth checking — from gateway offline to a query that times out only under load.
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Power BI Service vs Desktop: What's the Difference
Power BI Desktop builds reports; the Service hosts, shares and refreshes them. Compare licensing, gateways, workspaces, and what moves when you publish.