How to Hide Report in Power BI Workspace

Building a powerful report in Power BI is only half the battle, the other half is sharing it effectively. Sometimes, that means providing a clean, focused view for your audience by hiding the complex or detailed reports that power your dashboards. This article will show you exactly how to control what your users see in a Power BI workspace, focusing on the best-practice method for hiding reports.

Why Would You Want to Hide a Report in Power BI?

Hiding reports isn't about being secretive, it's about creating a better user experience and ensuring your stakeholders see exactly what they need - nothing more, nothing less. Your Power BI workspace is often the "kitchen" where you prepare your data visuals, and you don't always want your guests wandering through it.

Here are a few common scenarios where hiding a report is essential:

• Crafting Executive Dashboards: You've created a high-level dashboard with key performance indicators (KPIs) for the leadership team. You want them to focus on the at-a-glance metrics, not get lost navigating the dozens of detailed, granular reports you used to create those visuals.
• Simplifying the User Experience: A workspace can get cluttered quickly with reports, datasets, and dashboards. Hiding non-essential "helper" reports prevents your users from feeling overwhelmed and helps them find the primary content you want them to consume.
• Managing Works-in-Progress: You might have several reports in a developmental stage. Hiding them from general view ensures no one accidentally shares or makes decisions based on incomplete or unverified data.
• Controlling Data Navigation: By curating what’s visible, you guide your audience's analytical journey. You can present a single, polished dashboard as the main entry point, preventing users from pulling up a related but contextually different report by mistake.

The Best Method: Publishing a Power BI App

The most effective and formally endorsed way to hide reports from end-users is by publishing a Power BI App. It's crucial to understand the distinction Power BI makes:

• Workspaces are for collaboration. Think of this as the back-end studio where you and your team build, test, and refine content. Every member added to a workspace will see all the content inside it.
• Apps are for consumption. This is the finished, polished front-end product you share with your wider audience. You have complete control over which reports, dashboards, and links from the workspace are included in the app.

By creating an app, you can include a summary dashboard while completely hiding the five underlying reports that feed it. Your audience gets a clean, curated experience without the development clutter. Here's a step-by-step guide to doing it.

Step 1: Finalize Your Content in the Workspace

Before creating an app, make sure the content you do want to share is ready for primetime. Double-check that your reports and dashboards are accurate, visually polished, and titled clearly. Your app will pull directly from this workspace, so any changes made here can be pushed to the app later with an update.

For this example, let's assume we have:

• A dashboard named "Executive Sales Summary."
• A high-level report named "Sales Performance."
• Several detailed, messy reports like "Raw Sales Data by SKU," "Daily Transaction Log," and "[WIP] Sales Forecasting Model," which we want to hide.

Step 2: Create and Configure Your App

With your content ready, navigate to your workspace in the Power BI service online. In the top-right corner, you’ll see a button that says Create app.

Clicking this takes you to a configuration screen with three main tabs. Let's walk through each one.

Setup Tab: Brand Your App

This tab is for presentation. Make your app look official and easy to identify.

• App name: Give it a clear, descriptive name (e.g., "Company Sales Dashboard"). This is what users will see in their list of apps.
• Description: Add a couple of sentences explaining what the app is for, who should use it, and what data it contains.
• Support site: Provide a link where users can ask questions (e.g., a SharePoint page, Teams channel, or support portal).
• App logo: Uploading your company logo adds a professional touch.
• App theme color: Choose a color that matches your branding.

Content Tab: Curate What You Share

This is the most important step. On the Content tab, you will see a list of every item in your workspace - dashboards, reports, and datasets. Next to each item is a toggle to Include in app.

This is where you selectively hide your reports. Go through the list and:

• Toggle ON the "Executive Sales Summary" dashboard and the "Sales Performance" report.
• Toggle OFF the "Raw Sales Data by SKU," "Daily Transaction Log," and "[WIP] Sales Forecasting Model" reports.

After you make your selections, you can reorder the items using the up/down arrows to define the navigation order in the app. You can also rename items for the app view without changing their original names in the workspace.

**<em>Important Note on Interactive Dashboards:</em>** If a tile on your included dashboard links to a report you've "hidden" (toggled off), users can still access that report by clicking the tile. However, the report will not appear in the app's main navigation pane on the left. This allows you to maintain interactivity while keeping the main navigation clean. If you want to prevent access entirely, you'd need to ensure no dashboard tiles link to the hidden report.

Audience Tab: Control Who Sees It

The Audience tab is where you manage permissions. Instead of sharing a link with anyone, you specifically grant access to designated users or groups.

• Under the Audience section, start typing the names of individuals or Microsoft 365 groups (e.g., "Sales Team," "Executive Leadership").
• You can even create multiple audiences for a single app, showing or hiding specific items for each group. For example, your "Sales Managers" audience might see five reports, while the "Sales Reps" audience only sees two.

You can also control whether users can build their own reports from the underlying datasets or share the app with others. For 'consumption-only' users, it's often best to uncheck these options to maintain control.

Step 3: Publish Your App

Once you’ve configured the setup, content, and audience, click the Publish app button in the top-right corner. It may take a few moments. After it's published, Power BI will give you a direct link that you can share with the audience you defined. Users with access can also find the app by going to the Apps section in their Power BI navigation pane.

Now, your users will see a clean, professional, and focused analytics app containing only the content you want them to see. The clutter stays behind in the workspace for you and your fellow developers.

Can You Hide a Report Within the Workspace Itself?

This is a common question, and the answer is simple: No. You cannot selectively hide a report from a member within the same workspace.

Power BI's security model is designed around the workspace as a single collaborative container. If a user is given a role (Admin, Member, Contributor, or Viewer) in a workspace, they get that level of access to all items inside it. A Viewer can view everything, a Contributor can edit everything, and so on. There's no on/off toggle for individual reports inside that container.

If you need certain users to have a limited view, the Power BI App model isn't just a workaround - it's the intended solution.

Alternative Strategies for Managing Clutter

While publishing an App is the definitive way to hide reports for an audience, you can also use these strategies to manage your internal workspace more effectively.

Use Clear Naming Conventions

You can't hide reports from workspace members, but you can guide their attention. Adopt a simple naming system to signal the status and purpose of your content. For example:

• [WIP] Q3 Marketing Funnel // Work in progress
• [MASTER] Customer Demographics // Final, approved version
• [HELPER] Dashboard Data Model // Used to feed another report
• [ARCHIVE] Old Performance Report // Do not use

This 'social' solution makes it obvious to your collaborators which items are safe to use and which should be ignored, reducing accidental usage.

Utilize Separate Workspaces for Development and Production

For larger teams or critical projects, a common practice is to create two separate workspaces:

1. [PROJ] Sales Analytics - DEV: A development workspace where your data analysts can freely build, experiment, and collaborate. It’s expected to be messy.
2. [PROJ] Sales Analytics - PROD: A production workspace that contains only the finalized, approved reports. When a report is ready in the DEV workspace, a copy is published to the PROD one.

From the PROD workspace, you then publish the Power BI App for your business users. This creates a strong separation between development and consumption, keeping your production environment completely clean.

Final Thoughts

Hiding reports in Power BI is all about providing a curated and simplified experience for your consumers. The primary method isn't a hidden setting but a core feature: publishing a refined Power BI App from your collaborative workspace. This approach gives you granular control over the content and the audience, ensuring stakeholders see the insights, not the construction zone.

Building dashboards and managing user permissions in sophisticated tools like Power BI requires time and specialized knowledge. Here at Graphed, we automate this process by letting you connect your marketing and sales data sources and create real-time reports using simple, conversational language. Instead of wrangling data and configuring apps, you can ask questions in plain English - like "Show me a dashboard comparing Facebook Ads spend vs. revenue by campaign" - and get a shareable, always-on dashboard in seconds, saving you hours of manual work.