Power Automate and Power BI Integration for Automatic Email Sending

Published in

Microsoft Power BI

5 min readJan 22, 2025

In some cases, features like Subscribe or Data Activator in Power BI may not fully meet your needs. In such scenarios, Power Automate steps in. By integrating Power BI with Power Automate, you can automatically export and distribute your reports on a daily or periodic basis in different formats and under various scenarios.

Introduction

In this guide, we’ll walk through a straightforward method to set up automatic email sending for Power BI reports. Automated report distribution is a common requirement in many workplaces, ensuring stakeholders receive timely data that supports informed decision-making. Let’s explore how to make this process both efficient and seamless.

Prerequisites

To proceed, you must have the following prerequisites:

At least one Power BI workspace with reserved capacity (any SKU from A1/EM1 to A6/P3).
Access to the standard Power Automate connectors included with an Office 365 subscription.

Discovering Power BI — Power Automate

First, go to https://make.powerautomate.com.
Click on My Flow, then on New Flow.
Because your goal is to send an email every day, select Schedule Cloud Flow.

Give your flow a name, set the start time, and define how frequently it will run.

You will see the first interface like this. You may notice a New Designer option in the interface, which is Power Automate’s new design layout. If you’re accustomed to the old layout, you can switch back to it by selecting Disable New Designer.

Use the “+” sign at the top of the page to add each new step to your flow.

For example, to obtain the PDF output of your reports, select the Export to File for Power BI Reports action.

If you want to make use of other Power BI nodes, you can customize your flow however you like.

After choosing your Workspace and Report, you must select the desired output format. If you need extra parameters, you can include them as well.

In this example, we choose PDF format.

Next, to send your email, you can use Send an email (V2) or Send an email (V3). Version 3 uses Power Automate’s own email service to send emails, while Version 2 sends emails via your connected Outlook account.

Fill in the necessary fields, such as the recipient, subject, and email body.
Choose a file name for your PDF and make sure to include the “.pdf” extension.

For the Content field, add the PDF file content (File Content) generated by the previous step.

After you’ve completed all the steps, save your flow and run a test to verify.

For this first test, we’ll run it manually.

we’ll run the flow.

we’ll done the notification.

Once you start the test, confirm the notification. After launching the test, you should see that the flow has finished successfully.

Post-test, check your inbox to see if you’ve received the email with the PDF attachment.

Real-Life Scenario

In real-world use, your flows might occasionally fail for various reasons. In such cases, you may need to add special conditions or plan additional steps to handle different scenarios. The following example represents a comprehensive flow scenario used in practice.

This way, you can automatically and routinely distribute your Power BI reports using Power Automate, adapting to different needs while also taking precautions against potential errors.