Email subscriptions for reports and dashboards in the Power BI service

APPLIES TO: Power BI Desktop Power BI service

Subscribe yourself and others to Power BI reports, dashboards, and paginated reports. You'll receive an email on a schedule you set. The email will contain a snapshot and link to the report or dashboard. If you're a workspace administrator, learn how to manage subscriptions in your workspace, including how to take over subscriptions that are owned by others.

Subscribe to a report or dashboard in the Power BI service

It's never been easier to stay up-to-date on your most important dashboards and reports. Subscribe to reports and dashboards that matter most to you, and Power BI will email a snapshot to your inbox. You tell Power BI how often you want to receive the emails: daily, weekly, or when the data refresh. You can even set a specific time for Power BI to send the emails or have it run now. Set up to 24 subscriptions per report or dashboard, and provide unique recipients, times, and frequencies for each subscription.

Requirements

The requirements apply to users in the organization and to guest users. To create a subscription for yourself, you'll need permissions to access the particular report or dashboard and either:

• A Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, or
• Access to a workspace backed by a Power BI Premium capacity

Your Power BI admin also needs to enable subscriptions in your tenant. If you’re an admin, see Enable subscriptions in the Power BI admin portal. To export or subscribe to paginated reports, several tenant switches must be enabled.

Subscribe to a report or dashboard

Whether you're subscribing to a dashboard or to a report page, the process is similar. The same button allows you to subscribe to the Power BI service dashboards and reports. Subscribing to a report offers you a few more field options, so we'll use a report for our example.

Subscribing to a paginated report is slightly different, as outlined in Subscribe to paginated reports in this article.

1. Open the dashboard or report, and from the top menu bar, select Subscribe .

2. Select Add new subscription and give your subscription a name. By default, your subscription will be given the same name as your report page or dashboard. Optionally, change the name of the subscription to something more meaningful.

   

3. Use the yellow slider to turn the subscription on and off. Setting the slider to Off doesn't delete the subscription. To delete the subscription, select the trashcan icon.

4. Edit or add recipients by email address, ensuring that you've at least one. Optionally, add a subject and email message details.

   Note

   Guest users can only subscribe themselves.

5. For Power BI reports, use the dropdown to select the Report page you want to appear in the preview image. To subscribe to more than one page in a report, either select Add new subscription and choose a different page from the dropdown, or select the Full report attachment as checkbox under Also include. (For more information about full report attachments, see step 9 below.)

   Tip

   By default, a report subscription inherits the name of the active report page. Consider changing the subscription name if you select a different report page.

6. When creating a subscription for a report, you'll choose whether to Include my changes. When Include my changes is unchecked, Power BI ignores all changes you may have made to the report, and subscribes you to the report as published by the author. When Include my changes is checked, Power BI subscribes you to the report including all changes you've made to the report. Changes include:

   • filters (filter pane)
   • slicers
   • personalized visuals
   • cross-filtering or cross-highlighting
   • drill down or drill up
   • bookmarks
   • spotlights
   • focus mode

   If you're the author of the report, Include my changes is a great way to create individualized subscriptions for recipients. First, customize your report based on conditions such as country/region, team/department, and category. Then, subscribe colleagues to the customized report views.

   Note

   The Include my changes field isn't available for dashboards or paginated reports.

7. Select a Frequency for your subscription. You may choose Daily, Weekly, or After data refresh (Daily).

   Tip

   To receive a subscription email only on certain days, select Weekly and then select the checkboxes. If you select Monthly, enter the day(s) of the month you wish to receive the subscription email.

   • If you choose Daily, Hourly, Monthly, or Weekly, you can also choose a Scheduled Time for the subscription. You can have it run on the hour, or at 15, 30, or 45 minutes past. Select morning (AM) or afternoon/evening (PM).
   • You can also specify the time zone. If you choose Hourly, select the Scheduled Time you want the subscription to start, and it will run every hour after the Scheduled Time.

8. Select a Start date and optionally, an End date for your subscription. By default, the start date will be the date you created the subscription and the end date will be one year later. You can change it to any date in the future at any time before the subscription ends. When a subscription reaches an end date, it stops until you re-enable it. You'll receive notification(s) before the scheduled end date to ask if you'd like to extend it.

9. Include additional information in the email. Select one or more of these checkboxes.

   • Permission to access the report/dashboard in Power BI: Give recipients permission to open and view the report or dashboard in the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com).
   • Link to report/dashboard in Power BI: Include a “Go to report” button in the body of the email that links to the report or dashboard in the Power BI service.
   • Preview image (for Power BI reports only): Include a preview of the report page in the body of the email.
   • Full report attachment as (for Power BI reports only): If the report is in a workspace backed by a Premium capacity or Premium Per User (PPU) license, add the full report as an attachment instead of only a single report page. Select PDF or PowerPoint for the attachment format. The attachment respects all privacy labels for the report. The size of the attachment is limited to no more than 20 pages and less than 25 MB.

10. If everything looks good, select Save and close. To test out your subscription, select Run now to send the email to you right away. It doesn't trigger a data refresh of the underlying dataset.

You'll now receive an email and snapshot of the report or dashboard on the schedule you set. Subscriptions that have the frequency set to After data refresh will only send an email after the first scheduled refresh on that day.

Note

To avoid subscription emails going to your spam folder, add the Power BI email alias (no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com) to your contacts. If you're using Microsoft Outlook, right-click the alias and select Add to Outlook contacts.

Subscribe others

To create a subscription that includes others, in addition to the requirements necessary to create your own subscriptions, you'll also need:

• A Contributor, Member, or Admin role in that workspace. You’ll know you have the Contributor, Member or Admin role in a workspace if you're able to edit reports or dashboards in that workspace. Read more about roles in workspaces.

• To be part of the organization. Guest users can't subscribe others.

• If the report or dashboard isn't hosted in a Premium capacity, as indicated by the diamond icon, you can still subscribe others. However, they must also have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license.

  

Use group email aliases

When creating a subscription, you can add other email addresses in the same domain to the subscription. If the report or dashboard is hosted in a Premium capacity, you can subscribe group aliases, whether they're in your domain or not. You don't have to subscribe individual email addresses. The aliases are based on the current active directory.

Group type	Supported in email subscriptions
Microsoft 365 groups	Yes
Distribution groups	Yes
Dynamic distribution groups	Yes
Security groups	No
Mail-enabled security groups	Yes

Note

Workspaces backed by a Premium Per User (PPU) license are different from those backed by a Premium capacity, and don't support subscribing group aliases.

Subscribe external users

You can subscribe external users to a report or dashboard if your report or dashboard is hosted in a Premium capacity. Guest users can't add subscriptions for external users.

• If you subscribe external users to a report or dashboard, they'll receive a share notification immediately after you select  Save and close in the subscription pane. This notification is sent only to external users, not internal users, because external users require an invitation link to view the report or dashboard.

• Premium Per User workspaces don't qualify as Premium capacity workspaces.

• Sharing content with a colleague outside of your domain doesn't require a Premium capacity. For example, if you're aaron@contoso.com, you can share with anyone@fabrikam.com, but you can't subscribe anyone@fabrikam.com, unless that content is hosted in a Premium capacity.

• In order for external users to subscribe themselves to reports or dashboards, they must first be added as guest users. Guest users (also known as Business-to-business users) are external users who have been added to your organization as Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) guest users. To learn more about guest users, see Distribute content to external guest users with Azure AD B2B.

Subscribe to paginated reports

Subscribe yourself or others to paginated reports

Your Power BI admin must enable subscriptions in your tenant. In addition, the relevant tenant switches have to be enabled:

• Export to Excel
• Export to .csv
• Export reports as PowerPoint presentations or PDF documents
• Export reports as MHTML documents
• Export reports as Word documents
• Export reports as XML documents
• Create email subscriptions (Tenant settings > Export and sharing settings > Create email subscriptions)

In general, the process for subscribing to paginated reports is the same as subscribing to reports and dashboards, but there are a few differences worth noting. This section spells out these differences and other considerations to keep in mind when subscribing to paginated reports.

Paginated reports parameters

Paginated reports allow you to specify the view of the report people will receive in the subscription by setting the parameters in the subscription pane.

• Subscriptions can be sent with either the currently selected or default parameters for your report. You may set different parameter values for each subscription you create for your report.

• If your report author has set expression-based parameters (for example, the default is always today's date), the subscription uses that as the default value. You can change other parameter values and choose to use current values, but unless you explicitly change that value as well, the subscription uses the expression-based parameter.

Update parameters for an existing paginated report subscription

If you have an existing subscription to a paginated report, and you want to update the parameters applied to the report, follow these steps.

1. Re-render the paginated report with the new parameters.

2. Open the Subscriptions page.

3. Select Use current (rendered report) values.

4. Select Save.

Considerations unique to paginated report subscriptions

• You can subscribe other users in your organization to paginated reports that connect to any currently supported data sources, including Azure Analysis Services or Power BI datasets. Keep in mind the report attachment reflects the data based on your permissions.
• You can set up an unlimited number of subscriptions per paginated report.
• Guest users can only create subscriptions for themselves.
• The maximum attachment size is 25 MB.
• Unlike subscriptions for dashboards or Power BI reports, your subscription contains an attachment of the entire report output. The following attachment types are supported: PDF, PowerPoint presentation (PPTX), Excel Workbook (XLSX), Word Document (DOCX), CSV file, and XML.
• Optionally, include a preview image of the report in the email body. The image may differ slightly from the first page of your attached report document, depending on the attachment format you select.
• There's no After Data Refresh option for frequency with paginated reports. You always get the latest values from the underlying data source.
• Paginated report subscriptions in the Power BI service are similar to email standard subscriptions in Power BI Report Server and SQL Server Reporting Services. However, you can't create data-driven subscriptions for paginated reports in the Power BI service.

Manage subscriptions

Subscriptions are managed on a workspace level. Subscriptions can be viewed and managed by their creator and by the users assigned the Admin role. The Power BI workspace admin can view subscriptions, view logs, turn certain subscription features on and off, and edit and take over subscriptions.

Creator

Subscriptions in a workspace

To see all subscriptions that you own in a given workspace, start by selecting that workspace to make it active. Then, from the upper right corner of the Power BI service, select the gear icon > Settings > Subscriptions. This example shows all of your subscriptions for the workspace named Sales and Marketing for DOCS.

For help understanding workspaces, see Workspaces in Power BI.

From here, you'll see all subscriptions you've created in the currently selected workspace. For each subscription, Power BI displays the name you gave to the subscription, the name of the content you're subscribing to, and the content type. If you selected Include my changes, the State column will include the date. Search for subscriptions by keyword or filter by any of these fields. Select Edit to make changes to a subscription’s settings.

Subscriptions across all workspaces

To see all of your subscriptions, start by selecting My workspace to make it active. Then, from the upper right corner of the Power BI service, select the gear icon > Settings > Subscriptions.

From here, you'll see a list of all your subscriptions across all workspaces. Power BI displays the name of the subscription, the name of the associated workspace, the name of the content you're subscribing to, and the content type. If you selected Include my changes, the State column will include the date. Search for subscriptions by keyword or filter by any of these fields. Select Edit to make changes to a subscription’s settings.

Alternately, another way to see all of your subscriptions across all workspaces is to open the Subscriptions pane from a dashboard or report in My workspace, and select Manage all subscriptions.

Administrator

Workspace administrators

Users who have been assigned the Admin role in a workspace can view all subscriptions that have been created for Power BI reports, dashboards or paginated reports in that workspace, regardless of owner. Information on the subscription name, owner, report or dashboard name, and content type is provided. Workspace admins can also edit and take over subscriptions owned by others.

Note

Subscriptions created for reports and dashboards in an app or those hosted in your My workspace can only be managed by the user who created the subscriptions.

To navigate to this view from within a workspace, select the gear icon > Settings > Subscriptions.

Users with the Admin role can also make edits or take over ownership of subscriptions that aren't their own.

If for example, the owner of a subscription is on vacation and a new recipient needs to be added to their subscription, an admin can modify the subscription by selecting Edit and making the necessary updates to the subscription. The owner of this subscription will receive an email notification that their workspace admin has made an edit.

Admins can also take over ownership of subscriptions in workspaces they manage. Being able to take over a subscription is essential when the original owner leaves a team or an organization. When the admin completes the take over, the original owner receives an email, and will no longer see this subscription in their list of subscriptions.

Power BI administrators

Subscription controls and tracking for administrators

Power BI administrators have levers of control over subscriptions.

• Enable email subscriptions for all members of the organization.

• Enable all members of the organization, or specific users, to send email subscriptions to external users. See Invite external users to your organization.

• Enable specific attachment formats for paginated report subscriptions (PDF, PowerPoint presentation (PPTX), Excel Workbook (XLSX), Word Document (DOCX), CSV file, and XML).

View subscription audit and activity logs

Power BI administrators can use the Power BI audit and activity logs to view details about subscriptions. These details include:

• Created by
• Creation date
• Content subscribed to
• Workspace of content
• Frequency
• Modified by
• Modified date

See Operations available in the audit and activity logs in "Track user activities in Power BI" for details.

Considerations and limitations

For help with troubleshooting for the subscriptions feature, see Troubleshoot Power BI subscriptions.

General

• If you aren't able to use the subscription feature, contact your system administrator or IT help desk. Your organization may have disabled this feature or a maximum subscriber limit may have been reached.
• Power BI automatically pauses refresh on datasets associated with dashboards and reports that haven't been visited in more than two months. However, if you add a subscription to a dashboard or report, it won't pause even if it goes unvisited.
• On Daylight savings day, you won't receive your subscription emails but will receive two emails per subscription the day after.

Row-level security (RLS)

• For Power BI reports, dashboards, or paginated reports that use a dataset with row-level security (RLS), use caution when creating subscriptions for yourself and others. Power BI will warn you that the data contains RLS, but customers often scroll past the warning message.

  The static image sent in the subscription email will display data based on the owner of the subscription. For this reason, when creating subscriptions, be careful to ensure that confidential information isn't included in the static image. Other than that static image, the report or dashboard itself will open (or not) and display data based on the user's permissions.

Power BI reports

• Report page subscriptions are tied to the name of the report page. If you subscribe to a report page, and it gets renamed, you'll have to re-create your subscription.

Apps

• For Power BI apps you've installed, you can only create subscriptions for others if you're the owner of the app.
• Workspace admins can't manage subscriptions created by another user in an app (as opposed to a workspace). Subscriptions created within apps are saved to a user's My workspace and admins don't have access to users' My workspaces.

Unsupported features

• Dataset refresh operations using an XMLA endpoint.

• The Power BI visuals listed below aren't supported. When you subscribe to a report containing these visuals, they will display an error symbol.

  • Power BI custom visuals. The exception is those Power BI custom visuals that have been certified.
  • ESRI ArcGIS visuals
  • R visuals
  • Power Apps visuals
  • Python visuals
  • Power Automate visuals
  • The Paginated report visual
  • Visio visuals

Next steps

Troubleshoot Power BI subscriptions
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