Automatically export Power BI Reports to files in SharePoint using Power Automate

Do know how easy is to automatically save Power BI exported reports into SharePoint or other data sources?

Check a simple way of automating this process in this post.

First things first, for the report you want to automate the ‘Capture’, you’ll need to set up a Power BI Report subscription, so you’ll receive report updates on your Office 365 Outlook mailbox. From this e-mail message, we can set up a Power Automate Flow to export the content.

From the Report view under Power BI service, find the subscribe option:

You can select the page you want to subscribe and the frequency. The report is going to be sent as a link in the e-mail message body and as a PNG file as well. Important to highlight there’s a limit of 24 subscriptions per user for a dashboard.

Email received example:

Email received example:

After you have set up the report subscription, it’s time to build the Flow.

For this case, considering the e-mail message is going to be sent to an Office 365 Outlook account, create a Flow using the destination account for the subscription email and the ‘Office 365 Outlook/When a new email arrives (V2)’ trigger, and set some parameters:

  • Filter the message by the subject you’ve included in your subscription and
  • Mark ‘Has attachment’ as yes, for the Flow to be triggered only in those cases.

Then from the attachments list, just check if the attachment name ends with “.png”, if so, create the file in SharePoint (it could be with a list item attachment too).

After getting the emails from Power BI subscription, the Flow will be executed and the file will be placed in the chosen library:


From there you can build approval workflows or any other custom functionality that’s needed.

5 comments

    1. Hi, the example overwrites the export, you will need to put some logic on the file name when creating it…

  1. Hi Michel, thanks for this. Can the subscription be changed to a different format as opposed to .png please? E.g Excel or .CSV?

    Specifically I’m hoping to 1) update a sharepoint list daily with a listing of email addresses generated in a PBI report. Then 2) use this list of email addresses to burst a second PBI report.

    Any help with 1 would be great please… (and 2 if you fancy it 😉 )

    Thanks,

    Jonny

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