Choosing an R engine to install

Once it is decided that CRAN R is the R distribution to adopt, the first question when installing an R engine is: “Which version should I install? Do I choose the latest one, or do I opt for a previous one?” The usual answer to these kinds of questions is: “It depends!” In our case, the goal is to use the R engine within Power BI, so we need to understand which versions are used by the various products that admit the use of R within them.

The R engines used by Power BI

We saw in Chapter 1, Where and How to Use R and Python Scripts in Power BI, that only two Power BI products are allowed to use scripts in R and Python: Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service (remember that Power BI embedded is implicitly included when talking about the Power BI service). So, the answer “It depends!” has a clearer connotation now: if you need to share your reports with people inside your organization, then you have to...