How to Make Power BI Dashboard Public

Sharing your Power BI dashboard on a public website or with people outside your organization can be essential, but figuring out the “right” way to do it can be confusing. Power BI is built for secure, internal analysis, so making data public requires careful steps. This guide will walk you through the primary method for sharing a dashboard publicly, explain the critical security implications, and show you some secure alternatives for sharing with external partners.

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Why Share a Power BI Dashboard Publicly?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." While most Power BI reports live inside an organization, there are several solid reasons you might need to share one with the world:

• Embedding on a Website: You might want to display a live, interactive chart on your blog, company website, or annual report page. Think of a non-profit showing donation trends or a market research firm sharing public survey results.
• Client or Partner Portals: Sharing performance metrics with clients or partners who don't have (and don't need) a Power BI account.
• Public Data Initiatives: Government agencies, research institutions, and community organizations often need to publish data for public consumption, and an interactive dashboard is far more engaging than a static spreadsheet.
• Portfolio or Project Showcase: Displaying your data visualization skills on your personal website or in a project summary.

In all these cases, the goal is to provide read-only access to a report without requiring the viewer to log in. This is where Power BI's "Publish to web" feature comes in.

Understanding the "Public" in Power BI: A Word of Caution

This is the most important part of this article. When you use Power BI’s feature to make a report public, it means truly, fully public. Anyone on the internet with the link can view your report and the underlying data in it. Search engines can even index it.

Think of it like posting a photo on a public social media profile versus sending it in a private message. There is no password, no login, and no security once a report is published to the web. Therefore, you should never use this feature for any report containing sensitive or confidential information. This includes:

• Customer personally identifiable information (PII)
• Internal sales figures or financial data
• Employee data
• Proprietary business metrics
• Any data you wouldn't feel comfortable printing on a public billboard

Always double- and triple-check your data source before making it public. If you strip out all sensitive columns from the source file but leave the file name as "Confidential_Client_List_Q3_Results.xlsx," that could still be an issue. Always assume anything and everything in the report will be seen.

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How to Make a Report Public with "Publish to Web"

With the security warnings out of the way, let's get into the step-by-step process. The primary method for public sharing is creating an embed code using the "Publish to web" option in the Power BI Service (the online version of Power BI).

Note: This feature must be enabled by your Power BI administrator. If you don't see the option, you'll need to contact your IT department or a Power BI admin in your organization.

Step 1: Open Your Report in Power BI Service

First, log in to your Power BI account at app.powerbi.com. Navigate to the workspace containing the report you want to share and open it.

Step 2: Generate the Embed Code

1. With the report open, click on File in the top-left menu bar.
2. From the dropdown, hover over Embed report.
3. Select Publish to web (public).

You will now see a confirmation dialog box with a prominent warning about making your data public. Microsoft wants to make absolutely sure you understand the implications.

Step 3: Confirm and Get Your Code

If you're confident that the data is safe to share publicly, click Create embed code. You will be shown one final warning. Click Publish.

Power BI will then generate a success message with two options:

• A direct link to the report: You can send this link to anyone, and they can open the interactive report in their web browser.
• HTML iframe code: This is the snippet of code you copy and paste into your website's HTML to embed the report directly on a page.

You can adjust basic options like the default page that appears and the size of the embed window. Copy the link or the iframe code, and you're ready to share!

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Managing or Deleting Public Embed Codes

What if you make a mistake or a report no longer needs to be public? You can easily manage and delete your public embed codes.

1. In Power BI service, click the Settings gear icon in the top-right corner.
2. Select Admin portal (you'll need the right permissions) and then find the Embed codes tab. You might just have a Settings > Embed codes section depending on your permissions.
3. Here, you'll see a list of all embed codes you've created. You can retrieve the code again or click the ellipsis (...) and select Delete to permanently revoke public access. The old link will no longer work.

This is an essential safety feature for managing what data you have out in the wild.

Secure Alternative: Sharing with Specific External Users

What if you need to share a dashboard with a client, but the data is too sensitive to be fully public? This is a common scenario, and "Publish to web" is the wrong tool for the job. Instead, you should share the report directly with their business email account.

This provides a secure, authenticated-only viewing experience for specific people outside your organization.

How It Works

1. In the workspace or the report view, click the Share button.
2. Enter the full email address of the external user (e.g., contact@clientcompany.com).
3. Write a brief optional message.
4. Under the link options, decide if you want them to be able to reshare it or access the underlying data. For read-only viewing, you should uncheck these.
5. Click Send.

Requirements for Secure Sharing

• Licensing: Secure sharing typically requires both you (the sharer) and the recipient to have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. Power BI will handle guest account creation in your organization's Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) on the backend.
• Account Creation: The external user will receive an email invitation. They will need to sign in with their work credentials, which will create a guest-user account in your tenant, granting them access only to the specific report you shared.

This method is far more secure because access is tied to an individual's identity, but it requires the viewer to have (or create) a Power BI account and is dependent on licensing.

Best Practices for Public Dashboards

When preparing a dashboard for public consumption, moving beyond the technical steps and thinking about the user experience is a good idea. Here are a few tips:

1. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

An internal analyst might love a dashboard packed with a dozen slicers and complex matrix visuals, but this can overwhelm a public audience. Create a simplified version of your report specifically for public viewing. Focus on high-level insights and clear, easy-to-read charts.

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2. Check Mobile Responsiveness

Many people who click your link will be on a phone. In Power BI Desktop, use the "Mobile layout" view to create an optimized version of your report for smaller screens. This ensures your hard work doesn't turn into a jumbled, unusable mess on mobile.

3. Set the Refresh Schedule Accordingly.

The public report is a live view of your data. Make sure its scheduled refresh cadence in the Power BI Service matches how current you need the data to be. If it’s daily data, set a daily refresh.

4. Provide Context

Don't assume your audience understands the data. Use title cards, text boxes, and clear chart titles to explain what the user is looking at, where the data comes from, and what the key takeaways are.

Final Thoughts

Making a Power BI dashboard public is straightforward using the "Publish to web" feature, but it comes with a significant responsibility to protect your data. This method is perfect for genuinely public, non-sensitive information you want to embed on sites or share widely. For anything confidential, sharing directly with an external user's email provides a much more secure, controlled alternative.

While Power BI is an incredibly robust tool for deep business analysis, we know that getting all your data connected and building those initial reports often feels like a project in itself. We built Graphed because we believe valuable insights shouldn't be locked behind complex tools. It connects directly to your marketing and sales platforms (think Shopify, Google Analytics, HubSpot) and lets you build real-time, shareable dashboards just by describing what you want to see in simple, plain English - turning hours of report-building friction into a thirty-second conversation.