Wouldn’t it be nice if you could send a Power BI subscription to an email address outside of your organization? Maybe you have stakeholders that should be kept in the loop of how your business is performing. Power BI does not let you create subscriptions for external users at the moment, but luckily you can use Power Automate to accomplish this in just a few simple steps! Let’s get to it.

First thing, open up a Power BI report that you would like set up a subscription to an external user. When you click the subscribe button and configure the subscription, you will notice that you can only enter emails with your same domain. In the following picture, I am trying to add my powerbielite@gmail.com email in the subscription in addition to my default parker@bielite.com.

 

The red error message saying that “gmail.com” is outside my organization is the exact reason why I wanted to share this trick. Moving on, I removed the powerbielite@gmail.com email from the subscription and set the subscription frequency. Feel free to choose any frequency you like as this will not affect the following method.

Next, hop on over to Power Automate where all the magic will take place. Start by clicking the Create button, then Automated flow and then Skip. This will leave you with a new flow ready to be configured.

 

I tried a few different trigger and action combinations to get this to work, and the following method is the only thing that worked for me. Feel free to tweak this trick if you find a better solution. Simply search for email in the search bar and select When a new email arrives for Outlook or Gmail depending on your set up. I am choosing for Outlook since that’s what I use. This will create the trigger for your flow. In the following picture, I have expanded the Advanced options to see all the items we can configure.

 

We’re only going to want to trigger this flow when our specific subscription comes in, so we need to add in some details to define the scope. Hop back over to Power BI and let’s kick off our subscription to get an idea of how it will look in our Inbox. Open up the subscriptions and click the Run now button. Give it just a few minutes for the subscription to arrive.

 

You can see that the subject of the email contains the report name and tab name that the subscription is set for, making the pattern very easy to identify. In Power Automate, simply add the subject from the sample email into the Subject Filter field, then click New step. Search for “Forward” and select Forward an email. There are three fields to fill out. You can select the Message Id by clicking in the Message Id input field and then selecting it from the “Dynamic content” fields to the right. The To and Comment fields are self-explanatory.

 

Click “Save” and then give this flow a name. Next, click the Test button in the top-right corner and then click I’ll perform the trigger action. We now need to manually kick off the subscription to see if our flow is initiated.

After a few minutes waiting for the subscription to arrive, everything flowed perfectly! I received the usual subscription on my parker@bielite.com email and the Power Automate flow successfully forwarded it to my powerbielite@gmail.com email.

 

In the following picture of my Gmail account, you will see that the forwarded email contains the attachment from the subscription. For some reason, the other Power Automate actions I tried would not successfully send the attachment. Therefore, I elected to use this method 😊

 

Note that you can complete this fairly easily using rules directly in your mailbox, but I figured the Power Automate solution is a little bit more robust and can allow you to many things on top of simply forwarding the subscription. I hope you enjoyed this trick! Make sure to check out the video up at the top of the page. Subscribe to the blog and YouTube channel for more Power BI/Power Automate tricks!