How to Manage Permissions in Power BI

Creating powerful Power BI reports is only half the battle, the other half is sharing them with the right people without giving away access to sensitive data. To share your work confidently, you need to master Power BI's permissions and security settings. This guide will walk you through the different ways you can manage access, from assigning broad workspace roles to filtering data row by row for specific users.

Understanding the Basics of Power BI's Structure

Before diving into permissions, it helps to understand the hierarchy of how content is organized in Power BI. Getting this right is the first step to a secure and manageable reporting environment.

• Workspaces: These are the collaborative environments where you and your team create and organize BI content. Think of them as shared folders for your reports, dashboards, datasets, and dataflows. Permissions are often managed at this level.
• Reports: The interactive, multi-page visualizations you build in Power BI Desktop and publish to the service. A report connects to at least one dataset.
• Dashboards: A single-page canvas that displays key visualizations from one or more reports. They are designed to give a high-level overview.
• Datasets: The source data connection your reports are built on. Managing permissions for who can use and build with your datasets is a critical piece of data governance.

Understanding this structure is important because permissions can be applied at different levels, giving you granular control over who sees what.

Method 1: Dishing Out Access with Workspace Roles

Workspaces are your main collaboration hubs, and they use a role-based system to manage what team members can do. This is the best place to start when providing access to other Power BI content creators and contributors. There are four primary roles available.

The Four Workspace Roles Explained

• Admin: Has complete control. Admins can add or remove other users (including other Admins), publish or unpublish apps, and delete the workspace entirely. This role should be reserved for workspace owners or team leads.
• Member: The standard role for collaborators. Members have almost all the same permissions as Admins, including the ability to publish apps, share content, and manage gateways, but they cannot delete the workspace or modify user access. This is perfect for team members who actively build and share reports.
• Contributor: This role is for users who create and edit content within the workspace but shouldn't have the ability to distribute it. They can create, edit, and delete reports and dashboards but cannot publish or update the workspace's app.
• Viewer: This is a read-only role. Viewers can see and interact with all the reports and dashboards in the workspace, but they cannot modify them, share them, or access the underlying datasets. This is the most restrictive role and is useful for stakeholders who just need to consume the final reports.

How to Assign a Workspace Role

Adding users to a workspace is straightforward:

1. From your workspace, click the Access button in the top-right corner.
2. Type in the email address of the person or group you want to add.
3. Select the desired role from the dropdown menu (Admin, Member, Contributor, or Viewer).
4. Click Add.

Remember, assigning workspace roles is intended for managing your internal content creation team. For sharing finished reports with a broader, view-only audience, you should use Power BI Apps.

Method 2: Publishing Power BI Apps for a Broader Audience

What if you want to share a polished collection of reports with a large department or the entire company without giving them access to the messy, work-in-progress workspace? That’s exactly what Power BI Apps are for.

An app bundles together the specific dashboards, reports, and workbooks you want to distribute into a slick, professional-looking package. Your consumers view the content in a clean interface without seeing the backend workspace where it was created. Best of all, permissions for the app are managed completely separately from the workspace roles.

This means you can have a workspace where only Admins and Members have access for collaboration, but you can publish an app from that workspace and give hundreds of people view-only access to the finished product.

How to Publish and Manage App Permissions

1. In your workspace, click the Create app button in the top corner.
2. On the Setup tab, give your app a name and description.
3. On the Content tab, select which reports and dashboards from the workspace you want to include in the app. You can also organize them for easy navigation.
4. On the Audience tab, you define who can see the app. Type in the names of individuals or groups and click Publish app.

You can come back and edit the app's content or audience at any time by clicking Update app. This is the preferred, most scalable way to distribute finalized BI content across your organization.

Method 3: Sharing Individual Reports and Dashboards

Sometimes you just need to share a single report with one or two people for a quick review. While publishing an app is better for wide distribution, Power BI lets you share individual items for these specific situations.

When sharing a single report, you have a few options for the permissions you grant:

• Allow recipients to share this report: Does what it says. Use this with caution, as you can quickly lose track of who has access.
• Allow recipients to build content with the data associated with this report: This one is powerful. It grants users "Build permission" on the underlying dataset, meaning they can connect to it themselves to create their own reports in Power BI or analyze the data in Excel.

How to Share a Single Report

1. Open the report or dashboard you want to share.
2. Click the Share button.
3. Enter the email addresses of the people you want to share with.
4. Select the appropriate permissions you want to grant them.
5. Click Send.

Use this feature sparingly. It's great for ad-hoc sharing, but it can become difficult to manage if done for dozens of users and reports. If you find yourself repeatedly sharing the same report this way, consider creating an App instead.

Method 4: Row-Level Security (RLS) for Granular Data Control

What if you have one sales report that needs to be shared with your entire sales team, but each rep should only see their own sales data? You could create 20 different identical reports with different filters, but that’s a maintenance nightmare. The proper solution is Row-Level Security (RLS).

RLS is a feature that restricts data access at the row level based on the current user. You build a single report, but the data shown is automatically filtered for whomever is viewing it. The sales manager might see all the data, while individual reps only see the rows relevant to them.

A High-Level Look at Implementing RLS

Setting up RLS involves two main stages: defining roles in Power BI Desktop and assigning users to those roles in the Power BI service.

Part 1: In Power BI Desktop

1. Go to the Modeling tab in the ribbon and click Manage Roles.
2. Click Create to define a new role (e.g., "Sales Rep").
3. Select the table you want to apply a filter on (e.g., your sales data table).
4. In the Table filter DAX expression box, write a rule that filters the data. A common one is to filter based on the viewer’s email address. An expression might look like this: [SalesRepEmail] = USERPRINCIPALNAME(). This compares the email in the sales rep column to that of the person viewing the report.
5. Save the role. You can create as many roles with different rules as you need.

Part 2: In Power BI Service

1. After publishing your report, find the dataset it's based on and click the three dots (...), then select Security.
2. You'll see the RLS roles you created in Desktop. Select a role.
3. Start typing the names or email addresses of the users you want to add to that role.
4. Click Add, then Save.

Now, when those users view the report, Power BI will apply the DAX filter for their role, and they will only see the data they're authorized to see. It’s a powerful way to deploy one report to many users with different data access needs.

Final Thoughts

Mastering permissions in Power BI allows you to move from simply making charts to confidently deploying a secure and scalable enterprise reporting solution. By understanding the differences between workspace roles, apps, direct sharing, and Row-Level Security, you can choose the right tool for the job and make sure your data is always in the right hands.

We know that even with the best tools, managing reporting processes can become a bottleneck. Instead of waiting for a perfectly built dashboard with complex permissions, sometimes your team just needs immediate answers. With Graphed, we empower every team member to do just that. They can connect their own sources and ask questions in plain English to build real-time reports instantly, getting the custom-tailored insights they need without having to wait in line for a data specialist.