What is PPU Trial in Power BI?

A Power BI PPU trial unlocks all the platform's most powerful, enterprise-grade features for 60 days, completely free. This article will guide you through exactly what a Premium Per User (PPU) license is, how to start your trial, and how to decide if it's the right fit for your data analysis needs.

First, A Quick Refresher on Power BI Licensing

Before diving into the PPU trial, it’s helpful to understand where it fits in the Power BI universe. Microsoft offers several licensing tiers, each designed for different types of users and organizations.

Power BI Free: This is a great starting point for individuals who want to create reports and dashboards for their own use. You can connect to hundreds of data sources and build powerful visualizations, but you can't share your work with others.
Power BI Pro: The standard paid license for most business users. It includes everything in the free version, plus the ability to share and collaborate on reports and dashboards with other Pro users. This is the entry-level license for team-based analytics.
Power BI Premium Per User (PPU): The middle-ground option we're focusing on. It gives individual users access to most of the features found in the highest tier (Premium Capacity) without the hefty price tag. It’s perfect for users who need more advanced capabilities than Pro offers.
Power BI Premium Capacity: This is the enterprise-level solution. Instead of licensing individual users, organizations purchase dedicated computing resources (a "capacity") for their entire business. This is designed for large-scale deployments with many users who need to view, but not create, reports.

What Is Power BI Premium Per User (PPU)?

Think of PPU as your all-access pass to Power BI's best features, licensed on an individual basis. It was introduced to bridge the significant gap between the standard Power BI Pro license and the expensive Premium Capacity subscription. Before PPU, small teams or individuals who needed advanced features had to convince their company to stomach a massive investment of thousands of dollars per month.

A PPU license enables data analysts and power users to work with larger datasets, refresh their data more frequently, and leverage sophisticated AI and machine learning capabilities that are otherwise unavailable to Pro users.

Key Features Exclusive to Premium Licenses (including PPU)

Larger Dataset Models: Work with massive datasets up to 100 GB, compared to the 1 GB limit for Pro users.
Paginated Reports: Create and publish pixel-perfect, printer-friendly reports (like invoices or financial statements) that are ideal for exporting as PDFs or other formats.
More Frequent Refreshes: Refresh your datasets up to 48 times per day, ensuring your reports are nearly always up-to-date, versus only 8 times per day on a Pro license.
AI and Cognitive Services: Access advanced AI features like text analytics, sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, and image detection directly within your dataflows.
Advanced Dataflows: Build more robust and reusable data preparation logic with features like DirectQuery and Linked and Computed entities.
Deployment Pipelines: Use application lifecycle management (ALM) tools to manage the development, testing, and production stages of your Power BI content, ensuring a more stable and reliable reporting environment.
Greater Storage: Enjoy up to 100 TB of total storage, a huge leap from what's available with Pro.

How to Activate Your 60-Day PPU Trial

Starting your PPU trial is baked right into the Power BI service. You don't need to visit a special sign-up page or enter a credit card. Instead, you simply try to use a feature that is only available with a Premium license.

Step-by-Step Guide to Begin Your Trial

Log into your Power BI Service account (app.powerbi.com). You must already have a Free or Pro license associated with your work or school email to begin.
Once inside, navigate to any workspace and find a Premium-only feature to activate. A common and easy way to do this is to go into a report's dataset settings.
Click on the ellipsis (three dots) next to your dataset and select Settings.
Expand the "Scheduled refresh" section. Pro limits you to 8 refreshes per day. Click "Add another time" to try and add a ninth refresh.
A pop-up window will appear titled "Start trial of extended Pro capabilities." It will offer you a free 60-day trial of Power BI Premium Per User.
Click Start Trial. That’s it! Your account will be instantly upgraded, and a small diamond PPU icon will appear next to your user profile picture to indicate the change. All Premium features are now unlocked for you to use.

Once the 60-day period ends, you will lose access to the Premium features. Your content, reports, and datasets will still exist, but they’ll be unavailable until you either purchase a full PPU license or remove the Premium dependencies.

PPU vs. Pro: Is the Upgrade Worth It?

The PPU trial helps you determine if the extra features are worth the jump from Power BI Pro. While it's easy to just look at a list of features, the practical differences are what truly matters.

Data Size and Refresh Limits

The most tangible difference for many users is the limit on data. A Pro user can only build a report based on a 1 GB dataset. For marketers analyzing years of ad campaign data or sales teams reporting on millions of CRM entries, this limit can be hit surprisingly quickly. PPU raises this to 100 GB, which is a massive leap that allows for much more comprehensive analysis. Likewise, refreshing data 48 times daily (every 30 minutes) means faster, more responsive decision-making.

AI and Automation

Power BI Pro has some nice analytics features, but PPU's AI capabilities are on another level. For example, you can feed a column of customer reviews through a cognitive services model to automatically perform sentiment analysis right within your dashboard. This surfaces business insights that would otherwise require manual effort or a separate set of tools.

Development and Governance

For more mature analytics teams, Deployment Pipelines are a game-changer. They allow you to maintain separate environments for development, testing, and production. You can build and tweak a report in a safe "dev" space, have a manager review it in a "test" space, and then push the final version to the company-wide "prod" workspace with just a click. This prevents you from breaking critical reports that the leadership team relies on.

The Biggest "Gotcha" When Sharing Content

There's one critical limitation to understand with a PPU license: content in a PPU workspace can only be shared with and viewed by other users who also have a PPU license.

This means if you create a brilliant dashboard with a PPU trial and share the link with your manager who only has a Power BI Pro license, they won't be able to open it. This one-to-one licensing model is what makes PPU manageable for individuals but can create friction in teams with mixed license types. This is the primary difference between PPU and a full Premium Capacity subscription, which does allow a few content creators to build reports that can be viewed by thousands of Free or Pro users.

Is the Power BI PPU Trial for You?

The PPU trial is an excellent opportunity for specific types of users:

Ambitious Data Analysts: If you're constantly hitting the 1 GB dataset limit in Pro or wishing you could automate more of your analysis with AI, the PPU trial is a no-brainer. It lets you test-drive solutions to your biggest bottlenecks.
Small, Data-Driven Teams: A small marketing or sales team where every member is deeply involved in creating and analyzing data can get tremendous value from equipping everyone with a PPU license.
BI Developers: Professionals building complex reports will want access to advanced data modeling capabilities and deployment pipelines to manage their work more effectively.
Anyone Needing Paginated Reports: If part of your job involves creating print-ready financial statements, sales invoices, or operational reports, the paginated reporting feature alone can be worth the price of admission.

Final Thoughts

The Power BI Premium Per User trial is your free, 60-day ticket to experiment with enterprise-level business intelligence. It provides an excellent way for individuals and small teams to see if the advanced capabilities - from larger datasets to powerful AI - can fundamentally improve their reporting and decision-making processes before making a financial commitment.

We built Graphed because we know complex tools like Power BI can have a steep learning curve. If you find yourself spending more time wrestling with licensing tiers, data modeling, and DAX formulas than on actually getting insights, we can help. With Graphed you simply connect your marketing and sales data sources - like Google Analytics, Salesforce, or Shopify - and use plain English to build real-time dashboards in seconds. It allows anyone on your team to become a data analyst without learning a complex BI tool.