How to Publish Power BI Dashboard for Free

You’ve spent hours perfecting a Power BI dashboard, only to hit a roadblock when it's time to share it with someone outside your organization. If you’ve ever tried to share a report, you’ve likely run into the dreaded prompt for a Power BI Pro license. This article will show you two straightforward methods for publishing and sharing your Power BI dashboards for free, explaining the pros and cons of each approach.

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Understanding Why Sharing Power BI Dashboards Can Be Tricky

Before jumping into the methods, it’s helpful to understand the basic structure of the Power BI ecosystem. There are two main parts:

• Power BI Desktop: This is the free application you download to your computer. It’s where you connect to data, model it, and design your reports and visualizations. You can do all the creative and analytical work here entirely for free.
• Power BI Service: This is the cloud-based platform (app.powerbi.com) where you publish, share, and collaborate on your reports. This is where licensing comes into play.

Typically, to share an interactive Power BI report with a colleague, you need to publish it from the Desktop app to a "Workspace" in the Power BI Service. To view it, both you and the person you’re sharing with need a paid Power BI Pro license. This creates a secure, collaborative environment. But what if you just want to share a public dashboard or send a quick summary to a stakeholder without requiring them to have a license? That's what our free methods are for.

Method 1: Share a Publicly Accessible Dashboard with 'Publish to Web'

The primary way to share an interactive Power BI dashboard for free is by using the "Publish to web" feature. This powerful option generates a public link that anyone can use to view and interact with your report. It even provides an embed code so you can place your live dashboard directly on a website, blog post, or portfolio.

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An Essential Security Warning

This is the most important part of this entire guide: When you use "Publish to web," your report and the data within it become public. Anyone with the link can see it. Search engines can potentially index it. There is no security and no authentication required to view it.

Therefore, you should ABSOLUTELY NOT use this method for sensitive or confidential information. Never publish reports containing:

• Internal sales data or company financials
• Customer personally identifiable information (PII)
• Employee salaries or HR data
• Any proprietary business information

This feature is designed for sharing public information, such as dashboards built on open government data, charts for a public blog post, or a project for your professional portfolio (using non-sensitive sample data, of course).

Step-by-Step Guide to Publishing to the Web

With that warning out of the way, here’s how to do it. The process starts in the Power BI Service, not the Desktop application.

1. First, Publish from Power BI Desktop to the Service

Even though you’re aiming for a public link, you first have to get your report into the Power BI Service. Fortunately, every Power BI account comes with a free "My Workspace" for personal use.

In your completed report in Power BI Desktop, click the Publish button on the Home tab. You’ll be prompted to sign in to your Power BI account if you haven’t already. When asked to choose a destination, select "My Workspace" and click publish.

2. Open Your Report in Power BI Service

Head over to https://app.powerbi.com and log in. In the left-hand navigation pane, click on "My Workspace." You’ll see a list of all your published reports and datasets. Find the report you just published and click on it to open it.

3. Find the 'Publish to web (public)' Option

Once your report is open, navigate to the top menu and click on File > Embed report > Publish to web (public).

4. Acknowledge the Warning and Create the Embed Code

Power BI will display a prominent warning reminding you about the public nature of this feature. After carefully considering the implications, click "Create embed code."

In the next pop-up, you will be prompted to publish. Click "Publish." Power BI will then process your request and generate the public assets.

5. Copy Your Link or Embed Code

Success! A final window will appear with two options:

• A direct link that you can share via email, instant message, or a social post.
• An HTML iframe code that you can paste into the source code of a webpage or blog to embed the interactive dashboard directly.

You can copy whichever one you need. You can also define the default page of your report and its dimensions to best fit your website design. Anyone who visits the link or page can now filter, slice, and interact with your dashboard just as you designed it.

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How to Manage Your Public Reports

What if you make a mistake or decide you no longer want a report to be public? Don't worry, you can easily manage or delete your public links.

1. In the Power BI Service, click the Settings gear icon in the top right corner.
2. Select Manage embed codes from the menu.
3. Here, you will see a list of every report you have published to the web.
4. You can get the code again or, more importantly, click the three dots (...) next to a report and select Delete to permanently revoke access via that link. Within minutes, the link will no longer work.

Method 2: Export Static Files for Secure, Easy Sharing

What if your data is confidential, but you still want to share a visualization with someone who doesn’t have a Power BI Pro license? In this case, your best free option is to export a static version of your report. As a “static report,” the user will only get an image of the dashboard, meaning it’s not an interactive experience — users will not be able to slice or filter any data — but sharing a snapshot of data is often enough.

You can do this directly from both Power BI Service and Power BI Desktop. The end result is a polished, professional document that is easy to attach to an email.

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How to Export Your Report to PDF

The most popular method of static sharing is exporting a report as a PDF. Creating a single PDF document gives you a professional, unalterable preview that's easy to read. Each page in your Power BI report will become a separate page in the PDF.

1. Open your final report either in Power BI Desktop or the Power BI Service.
2. Go to File > Export > Export to PDF.
3. A dialog box may appear showing the report is being exported to a PDF.
4. Once complete, the document will either download automatically or prompt you to save it. Then everything is good to go! Just edit the name and location and you can start sharing this document right away.

Exporting Reports to PowerPoint

In some cases, what you want is a presentation - this is where Power BI offers its feature of embedding its reports in a professional Power BI presentation.

Every page in your report becomes an independent PowerPoint slide. These slides have all the snapshots but can be edited for more information, notes, titles, or headers directly from your presentation software. It gives your stakeholders the flexibility to reuse individual charts for their next meetings - a small feature that makes your work easy.

1. With your report open in the Power BI Service, go to Export > PowerPoint.
2. Select how you want to use the snapshot, for instance, to make it easier for viewers to use the data visualization, embed it directly into the presentation
3. When it's ready, the file will automatically be uploaded to be shared.

Final Thoughts

Sharing your Power BI dashboards doesn't have to require a paid license. By using the "Publish to web" feature for public data or exporting to PDF for secure, static snapshots, you can effectively communicate your insights to a wide range of audiences without spending a dime.

While these workarounds serve a purpose, they highlight the friction involved in simple data sharing. We built Graphed to streamline this entire process of analysis and reporting. We let you connect directly to platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce, then build and share live, always-updated dashboards with your team using simple instructions in plain English. There’s no complex setup or licensing maze - just instant answers and secure reports, so you can focus on making decisions, not on how you’ll share the data to make it.