Publish R visuals from Power BI Desktop to Power BI Service (Unmanaged Tenant)

Question

--- EDIT ---

My problem was related to my domain not being a managed tenant.

There are thus two correct answers to this question.

1. The trivial answer where one simply publishes to Power BI Service from Power BI Desktop.
2. The answer for this when one is an unmanaged tenant.

For reference, below is still the original question.

--- EDIT ---

After extensive reading in Power BI's documentation and community posts, it is still not clear whether R visuals can be viewed in any other version of Power BI other than the desktop version, using .pbix files.

This is not very useful, as many use cases for Power BI are focused on sharing visuals online and within a browser.

The following (possibly inaccurate) observations have be made from what I have seen so far:

1. "Once the report is created in Power BI Desktop, you can publish the report containing one or more R visuals to the Power BI service." [1]

2. "R Visuals do not display when using Publish to web." [1]

3. A Power BI Pro license is necessary to view R visuals in reports and dashboards. [1]

4. There is no R button to add visuals in Power BI Service.

5. Many of the R visuals in the gallery [2] link to .pbix files and not to working Power BI Online instances. However, they claim to have been "tested on powerbi.com". At least one of them links to GitHub and something called Microsoft R Open . Also here I don't see working online examples.

6. It seems to be possible for a competent programmer to create a custom visual in R, convert it to some other type [3] and to import this custom visual into Power BI, perhaps bypassing the present issue. Any comments on this would be welcome.

7. It appears that some enterprise users are using R visuals in their deployment, although it is not clear how one would approach this and whether this makes sense for smaller (Power BI Pro) use cases. (edit: link add [4])

Bearing this in mind, the question is:

Is it possible to share Power BI Service dashboards that include R tiles and to have a working instance for the user with whom this is shared to access via the Power BI Service?

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-r-visuals

[2] https://community.powerbi.com/t5/R-Script-Showcase/bd-p/RVisuals

[3] https://rpubs.com/jpf5046/313759

[4] https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/r-in-pbie/

Answer 1

I literally just downloaded the sample .pbix file from the page you provided and published it to Power BI Service (with Pro license). And then share the report with another user (also with Pro license) within the organization and it just works.

So the answer is yes.

Answer 2

If your account is an unmanaged tenant, the following (1.) worked for me.

Strategy (1.)

A managed tenant means that Microsoft recognises you as the owner of the domain (eg for john@mydomain.com, the domain is mydomain.com). I assume this is for security reasons.

If you have a Pro license (not the free Pro trial) then you can login to Power BI Service with the account that you use for admin. (If your account does not have admin capabilities, then this will not work.) Someone in your organisation should have admin capabilities.

Within Power BI Service, there is an admin tab in the settings on the top right. Within these settings one can manage users. Instead of using john@mydomain.com, one can assign a Power BI Pro license to john@mydomain.onmicrosoft.com at no extra cost apart from the Power BI Pro license fee. If you do not also assign a 365 license to this new user, then this is only a dummy address as far as I know really, without an associated email account. The only downside of this that I immediately can think of would be if you wanted to configure some sort of automatic sharing for Power BI Service between users of the mydomain.com email addresses.

After this, switching to the user john@mydomain.onmicrosoft.com one should be able to see published reports on Power BI Service with the R visuals now working correctly.

Strategy (2.)

There is also an option to add a domain in this admin tab which should allow you to use john@mydomain.com as a username with a now managed tenant. One can add a domain by a verification code that is emailed to the owner of the mydomain.com domain or by adding a TXT file to the domain configuration.

I did not try (2.) but this should work for the case where you have access to the domain administration and you want to retain your username. I have not tried this, but after doing this step your domain should be verified and R visuals should now display in Power BI Service.