How to Publish an App in Power BI

Creating a great report in Power BI is only half the battle, the real value comes when you can share it effectively with your team or stakeholders. Instead of emailing out individual report links that get lost in crowded inboxes, packaging your work into a polished, professional Power BI app is the best way to distribute your insights. This guide will walk you through exactly how to publish a Power BI app, from the pre-launch checklist to updating it with fresh content.

What Exactly is a Power BI App? (And Why Should You Use One?)

Think of a Power BI app as a professional, organized container for your analytics content. While a workspace is your development environment - your "workshop" - an app is the finished product you present to your audience. Instead of sharing a link to a single report, you share a link to an entire collection of related reports, dashboards, and datasets, all bundled into a single, easy-to-navigate package.

Here’s why publishing an app is usually a better approach than sharing direct links to reports:

• Centralized Hub: You can bundle dozens of related reports and dashboards into one place. Your team gets a single destination for all marketing campaign data, for example, instead of bookmarking ten different links.
• Controlled Experience: You decide what content the audience sees and how it's organized in the app's navigation panel. This creates a clean, guided experience, preventing users from getting lost in the clutter of a development workspace.
• Simplified Permissions: You manage access for the entire app at once. You can grant access to entire user groups or the whole organization with a few clicks, rather than managing permissions for each individual report.
• Professional Presentation: Apps can be branded with your company logo, a custom theme color, and clear descriptions, making your analytics look like an officially sanctioned product, not just a one-off report.

In short, apps transform your collection of reports into a polished, distributable business intelligence product that's easier for your audience to find, navigate, and use.

Before You Publish: Your Pre-Flight Checklist

Just like any launch, a little prep work goes a long way in ensuring a smooth publishing process. Before you hit the "Create app" button, run through this quick checklist.

1. Your Workspace is Complete and Organized

An app is built from the content within a single Power BI workspace. Make sure all the reports, dashboards, and datasets you intend to share are finalized and located together in one workspace. It’s far easier to build an app from a well-organized workspace than one filled with drafts and disconnected reports.

2. You Have the Correct License

To create or publish a Power BI App, you need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. Users who will view your app will also need a Pro or PPU license, unless your workspace is hosted in a Power BI Premium capacity, which allows free Power BI users to view the content.

Bottom Line: At a minimum, both you (the creator) and your audience need a Pro license.

3. Your Reports are Polished and Finalized

Review every report and dashboard you plan to include.

• Are the visuals clear and easy to understand?
• Are all titles, labels, and data points accurate?
• Have you checked for broken visuals or error messages?
• Is the design consistent and professional?

Remember, you're presenting this content to a wider audience. Take a few extra minutes to make sure it’s clean, accurate, and ready for primetime.

Step-by-Step: How to Create and Publish Your Power BI App

Once your checklist is complete, you're ready to build and publish. The process is broken into three simple configuration tabs: Setup, Content, and Audience.

Step 1: Open Your Workspace and Create the App

Navigate to the Power BI workspace that contains the reports and dashboards you want to publish. In the top right corner of the workspace view, you'll see a button that says "Create app." Click it to begin the configuration process.

Step 2: Configure the App Setup

The first screen you’ll see is the Setup tab. This is where you define the app's branding and name. It's a small step, but it makes a big difference in how professionally your work is perceived.

• App name: Give your app a clear and descriptive name, like "Q3 Marketing Performance" or "Sales Team Daily Scorecard."
• Description: This is a crucial field. Use it to explain what the app is for, what kind of data it contains, and who stakeholders should contact with questions. Good descriptions reduce confusion for your end-users.
• Logo: Upload a company logo or a relevant icon to make your app instantly recognizable. This adds a nice touch of professionalism.
• App theme color: Choose a color that matches your brand. This color will be used in the app's top navigation bar.

Step 3: Add and Organize Your Content

Next, click on the Content tab. This is where you select which items from your workspace will be included in the app and how they'll be displayed in the navigation.

Click the "Add content" button. You’ll be prompted to select reports, dashboards, and other content from your current workspace. Importantly, you don't have to include everything from the workspace. This allows you to keep draft reports or sensitive datasets in the workspace without showing them to your app users.

Organizing the Navigation

After adding your content, you can organize how it appears in the app's side navigation pane.

• Reorder items: Simply drag and drop the reports and dashboards into a logical order. For example, place a high-level summary dashboard at the top.
• Create sections: Use the "New section" option to group related content, like creating sections for "Paid Ads Performance," "SEO Analytics," and "Email Marketing." This makes navigation much more intuitive for complex apps.
• Add links: You can also add external links to the navigation. This is great for linking out to documentation, related SharePoint sites, or even another Power BI report that lives in a different workspace.

Step 4: Define Your Audience and Set Permissions

This is arguably the most important step: deciding who gets to see your app and what they can do with it. Click on the Audience tab.

In the main access section, you can grant access to:

• Specific users or groups: Enter the names or email addresses of individual colleagues or entire Microsoft 365 Groups (e.g., "The entire marketing team").
• The entire organization: If the app is meant for everyone in your company, you can toggle this option on.

Below the user selection, you’ll find advanced controls under the "Advanced" dropdown:

• Allow all app users to connect to the app's underlying datasets using the Build permission: This is a powerful setting. If you enable this, users can connect to your datasets from their own Power BI Desktop and create new reports based on your data models. This promotes self-service analytics but should only be enabled if you want others to build on your work.
• Allow users to make a copy of the reports in this app: This lets users save a copy of your app’s reports to their own "My Workspace," where they can edit and customize them for their personal use without changing the original.

Think carefully about these settings. For a read-only management dashboard, you'd likely keep both unchecked. For a collaborative team app, you might enable them.

Step 5: Publish Your App

Once you've configured the setup, content, and audience, all that's left is to hit the "Publish app" button in the bottom-right corner. Power BI will double-check everything, and once it's complete, a window will pop up with a shareable app link. You can copy this link and send it directly to your users.

Users can access the app via your direct link or they can find it by going to the "Apps" section in their Power BI service navigation and clicking "Get apps."

Managing and Updating Your Published App

Your work isn't done once the app is published. Reports and dashboards often need updates as business needs change or new data becomes available. One of the most common pitfalls for new Power BI users is understanding how updates work.

Important: Changes you make to reports in the workspace are NOT automatically reflected in the published app. You must explicitly publish the update after saving your changes in the workspace.

The process is simple:

1. Make your changes to a report or dashboard within the workspace.
2. Go to the main workspace view and click the "Update app" button in the top-right corner.
3. You’ll go through the same Setup, Content, and Audience tabs. Review the settings to make sure they are still correct.
4. Click "Update app" again.

Power BI will then push the latest version of your content to all existing app users. They don't need a new link, the app simply updates for them.

Final Thoughts

Packaging your reports into a Power BI App is the best way to distribute your hard work in a structured, professional, and secure manner. By bundling a curated selection of dashboards and visuals into a single package, you provide your stakeholders with one clear source of truth, making it easier for everyone to stay informed and make data-driven decisions.

Of course, before you can package and publish a report, you have to build it first - and that often starts with the time-consuming process of gathering data from a dozen different platforms. Manually stitching together data from sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, Salesforce, and Facebook Ads is often the biggest bottleneck. This is where we built Graphed to help. It connects to all your platforms in seconds, so you can stop wrestling with CSVs and instead ask for the exact dashboards you need in plain English, and have them built and refreshed automatically.