How to Grant Access in Power BI

Creating a compelling Power BI report is one thing, getting it into the hands of the people who need it is another. Sharing your reports and dashboards securely and efficiently is fundamental to making data-driven decisions across your team or organization. This guide will walk you through the primary methods for granting access in Power BI, from simple direct shares to robust collaboration with workspaces and apps.

Understanding Your Power BI Sharing Options

Before jumping into the "how," it helps to understand the "what." Power BI offers several distinct ways to share your content, each suited for different needs. Think of it like your toolbox - you need to pick the right tool for the job.

• Direct Sharing: This is the quickest way to share a single report or dashboard with a few specific people. It's great for ad-hoc requests or sharing with a small group of stakeholders.
• Workspaces: These are the collaborative hubs of Power BI. You use workspaces to develop content with your team. By adding people to a workspace, you give them access to all the content within it, making it ideal for creating and managing reports together.
• Power BI Apps: An app is a polished, professional way to distribute a collection of dashboards, reports, and datasets to a broad audience. It's a read-only experience, which is perfect for company-wide reporting where you don't want viewers to alter the original reports.
• Sharing with External Users: You can securely share your content with collaborators, clients, or partners outside of your organization, but this requires some specific Azure Active Directory (AD) settings.

Keep in mind that to share content (and for others to view it), Power BI requires both the sender and the receiver to have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. The main exception is if your content is hosted in a Power BI Premium capacity, in which case viewers without a Pro license can still access it.

How to Share Individual Reports and Dashboards

Directly sharing a report is the simplest form of granting access. Use this when you need to send a single piece of content to one or more individuals and don't need the bells and whistles of a workspace or app.

Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Navigate to the report or dashboard you want to share within the Power BI service (the browser version).
2. Look for the Share button, typically located in the top action bar. Click on it.
3. In the "Send link" dialog box that appears, you can enter the names or email addresses of the people you want to share with. These must be individuals within your organization (unless external sharing is enabled).
4. Once you've entered the recipients, you can manage their permissions. Click on "People in your organization with the link can view and share" to open up for granular settings, or just customize the options presented. Below are key permissions to know about:
5. Once your permissions are set, click Send. Your recipients will get an email, and the report will also appear in their "Shared with me" section in Power BI.

Pro Tip:

You can also generate a shareable link instead of sending it directly. In the same "Send link" dialog, choose the appropriate access option (e.g., "People in your organization," or "Specific people"). You can then click "Copy link" and distribute it through Slack, Teams, or another communication tool.

Using Workspaces for Team Collaboration

When you're working with a team to create, test, and publish reports, a workspace is the way to go. It's a shared environment where everyone can collaborate on the same set of reports, dashboards, and datasets. Granting access is done at the workspace level by assigning specific roles.

Understanding Workspace Roles

Power BI gives you four distinct roles to control what users can do inside a workspace. Choosing the right role is essential for managing your content securely.

• Admin: Have full control. They can do everything, including adding or removing other users (including other Admins), updating or deleting the workspace, and publishing apps. This role should be reserved for workspace owners or team leads.
• Member: Almost as powerful as an Admin. Members can add other users (but not Admins), publish reports, create dashboards, and share content. They also have the ability to publish or update an app unless an Admin has restricted that action. The key difference is they can't delete the workspace.
• Contributor: The ideal role for content creators. Contributors can create, edit, and publish their own reports and content within the workspace. However, they can't share reports or publish an app. They are focused on content creation, not distribution.
• Viewer: This is a read-only role. Viewers can see and interact with all the reports and dashboards in the workspace, but they cannot make any changes or share anything. It’s useful for managers or stakeholders who need visibility into a project's progress without having editing rights.

How to Add Users to a Workspace

1. Open the workspace you want to manage.
2. In the top-right corner, click Access.
3. In the Access pane, you'll see a list of current members. To add someone, type their name or email address into the search box.
4. Select their user role from the dropdown menu (Admin, Member, Contributor, or Viewer).
5. Click Add. The new user will now have the permissions you assigned them for all content within that workspace.

Publishing a Power BI App for Broad Audiences

A Power BI App is the most professional and secure way to distribute finalized content to a large number of people. It bundles related reports and dashboards into a single, easy-to-navigate package.

The beauty of an app is that it separates the "development" area (the workspace) from the "consumer" area (the app). Your team can experiment in the workspace, while your end-users only see the clean, polished final product.

Steps to Create and Publish an App:

1. Navigate to your finalized workspace.
2. In the top right, click the Create app button.
3. On the Setup tab, give your app a name, description, and an optional logo. These details help users find and understand your app in the marketplace.
4. Go to the Content tab. Here you will define which of the workspace content items should be included in the app. Anything visible in your Published view will be what appears for your end users. You can also add other materials to an app not found in the original workspace such as direct weblinks to sources like YouTube and Microsoft Forms by choosing "Add a link." This makes an app into a one-stop destination for anything related to its content. Another item is to create a section that acts like a clickable chapter of the app. All content that follows below that section until another appears sits together.
5. Next click on the Audience tab. Here's where you decide who can access your app. You can add entire user groups (e.g., 'The entire sales team') or specific individuals.
6. Make your audience choices by clicking on "+New audience" and giving it a name for easier future management. Toggle what content in your app that particular named audience group can or cannot see via the "eyeball" icon to toggle their view on/off for a certain page. It's a nice easy visual method to remember each group's permission level.
7. Finally, click the Publish app button in the bottom corner (if this is new) or click Update app (if it's an existing one you only need to slightly change). That’s it! The designated users can now find and install your app from the "Apps" marketplace within their Power BI service.

Sharing with External Users (Guests)

What if you need to show a report to a client, partner, or contractor? Power BI supports this through Azure AD B2B (business-to-business) integration. Essentially, this feature allows you to securely invite guest users from other domains into your Power BI environment.

The setup for this is typically handled by a Power BI or Azure administrator, as it requires enabling specific settings in both platforms. But once it's configured, the process for you (as a report owner) is fairly simple:

1. Use the same Share button you would for an internal colleague.
2. Enter the full email address of the external guest.
3. The guest will receive an email invitation. Upon their first attempt to click, they will be given login steps to properly access their item within your environment.
4. From there they can engage with that item on the basis of any extra permissions or constraints added at the source, like any other end-user of the content.

Ongoing proper governance involves managing these guest access grants. It is best to maintain good data hygiene and is done back at the Admin level view where an audit check-up and de-provisioning schedule often takes place within Azure or the central Power BI Admin area.

Final Thoughts

Sharing is what turns your data analysis from a solo activity into a driver of business decisions. By mastering direct sharing for quick needs, using workspaces for deep collaboration, and leveraging apps for formal distribution, you can ensure the right people get the right insights securely and effectively.

We built Graphed because we saw how much time teams spend wrestling with tools just to see and share their own data. Instead of spending hours in Power BI configuring permissions and dashboards, our platform allows you to connect your marketing and sales sources in one click. Then, you can simply describe what you want to see - "Create a dashboard comparing Facebook spend vs Shopify revenue by campaign" - and we build the real-time, shareable dashboard for you in seconds. The whole process, from connecting data to collaborating with your team on a live dashboard, becomes as easy as having a conversation.