How to use Power BI on Mac Devices

Power BI is a powerful BI tool, yet doesn’t support Mac devices, sadly.

I was working for a company where 90% of our staff had a MacBook and love it, 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 with you my experience trying to implement Power BI on Mac devices, hope this would be helpful for you if you are looking for a solution.

Disclaimer: I then fall in love with Holistics, and now I’m working at Holistics.

Our Recommended Solutions

Since Power BI can’t run on a Mac device, here are our recommendations to run Power BI on Macintosh Devices

1. Install and run Power BI on a Virtual Machine, then remote to that Virtual Machine
2. Install and run Power BI on a PC, then remote to that PC
3. Use another alternative BI solution

Power BI’s plan on Mac Devices

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 on their plan.

Microsoft’s response on Power BI for Mac

1. Run Power BI on a Virtual Machine

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/

Then you install and run Power BI on that Virtual Machine.

Finally, install Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac on each device to let your team access to that Machine.