How to Share Power BI Report with External Users

Sharing your Power BI report with a client, partner, or consultant outside your organization can feel surprisingly tricky. While Power BI is built for collaboration, extending that collaboration to external users requires understanding a few key settings and choosing the right method for your situation. This guide will walk you through the most effective ways to share your reports externally, from simple direct sharing to creating polished, curated apps.

First Things First: Check Your Tenant Admin Settings

Before you can share anything with people outside your company, your Power BI administrator must have external sharing enabled. If you are the admin, you can set this up yourself. If not, you may need to send a request to your IT team. Trying to share a report and having it fail without explanation is a common point of frustration, and this setting is usually the culprit.

Here’s how an admin enables external sharing:

1. Sign in to the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com) as an administrator.
2. Click the Settings gear icon in the top right corner and select Admin portal.
3. In the Admin portal, go to Tenant settings.
4. Scroll down to the Export and sharing settings section.
5. Find the setting named Share content with external users and make sure it is Enabled. Your organization may choose to apply this to the entire organization or limit it to specific security groups for tighter control.

Once this is enabled, you're ready to start sharing reports. This single admin setting governs all the secure sharing methods below.

Method 1: Direct Sharing (The Easiest Approach)

Directly sharing a report is the quickest and most common method for ad-hoc sharing with a few individuals. It works by sending an email invitation to the external user's email address. Behind the scenes, this method uses Azure Active Directory Business-to-Business (Azure AD B2B) to create a guest account for them in your organization's directory.

Step-by-Step Guide to Direct Sharing:

1. Navigate to the report you want to share, either in your workspace or an app. To share, you must have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license.
2. Click the Share button in the top action bar.
3. In the Share report pane, enter the full email address of the external user. A message will confirm you are sharing outside your organization.
4. Choose the permissions you want to grant the external user. The key options are:
5. You can write an optional message, which will be included in the email they receive.
6. Click Send.

What the External User Experiences

The external user will receive an email from Microsoft Power BI. The email contains a link to the report. When they click the link, they will be prompted to sign into Power BI using their own organization's email credentials. If they don't have a Power BI license, they’ll be prompted to sign up for a free license or start a trial, which is a required step for them to view the content.

Method 2: Sharing Through Power BI Apps (The Most Professional Choice)

When you need to distribute a collection of reports, dashboards, and datasets to a wider external audience in a more official and polished way, a Power BI App is the best choice. An app packages related content into a professional-looking container with its own navigation, making it easier for users to consume.

You’re not just sharing a link to a single report, you're providing access to a complete, managed analytics application.

Step-by-Step Guide to Sharing via Power BI App:

1. Ensure all the reports and dashboards you want to share are in a single workspace.
2. In the workspace, click the Create app button in the top-right corner.
3. Setup Tab: Give your app a name, description, and logo to give it a branded feel.
4. Content Tab: Add the specific reports and dashboards you want to include in the app from the workspace. You can reorder them and organize them into sections.
5. Audience Tab: This is the most crucial part. After creating at least one audience group, you can control who sees what content. In the Enter email addresses box, add the email addresses of the external users you want to share with.
6. Grant them permission to view the content. You can also decide whether to allow them to connect to the underlying datasets.
7. Click Publish app (or Update app).
8. After publishing, you can copy the app link and send it directly to your external users for easy access.

The experience for the external user is similar to direct sharing. They'll get an email with a link, sign in, and access the entire collection of content you've curated for them.

Method 3: Embed in SharePoint Online

If you already have a collaborative SharePoint Online site set up with external partners, embedding a Power BI report directly onto a SharePoint page is an excellent way to provide context. The report lives alongside other relevant files and information instead of being a separate link.

How to Embed a Power BI report in SharePoint Online:

1. Navigate to the Power BI report you want to share.
2. Go to File > Embed report > SharePoint Online.
3. A dialog box will appear with a URL. Copy this link.
4. Go to your SharePoint Online site and navigate to the page where you want to embed the report.
5. Edit the page and add a new web part by clicking the + icon.
6. Search for and select the Power BI web part.
7. Click Add report.
8. Paste the URL you copied from Power BI into the Power BI report link field.
9. The report will embed directly on the page. Be sure to save and publish your SharePoint page changes.

Important Note: Embedding the report on the page does not automatically grant users permission to see it. You must still grant access to the external users in SharePoint and either share the Power BI report directly with them (Method 1) or give them access to the BI App (Method 2).

Method 4: Publish to web (Use with Caution)

This method is fundamentally different from the others because it is public and not secure. "Publish to web" generates a public link that anyone on the internet with the link can access without needing to sign in. The data is not protected.

You should only use this method for data that is genuinely public and has no confidential information whatsoever. For example, census data, public health anonymous statistics, or municipal information.

How it Works:

1. In a report, go to File > Embed report > Publish to web (public).
2. A warning dialog will appear, explaining the risk. Read it carefully.
3. If you are certain the data is safe to be made public, click Create embed code.
4. Click Publish.
5. Power BI will generate a public link and an HTML snippet you can use to embed the report on a public website.

Many organizations disable this feature entirely at the admin level due to the security risk. Always think twice and confirm with your organization's data governance policies before using it.

Key Considerations and Best Practices

When sharing with external users, keeping a few things in mind can ensure a smooth and secure process.

• Licensing Matters: To share content, you (the publisher) need a Power BI Pro or PPU license. The external users (the consumers) generally need at least a Power BI Free license to view the shared content. Content hosted in a workspace with a Power BI premium capacity is the exception, as it allows free users to view content.
• Row-Level Security (RLS) Still Applies: Guest users are added to your directory, and you can assign them to RLS roles just like internal users. This is a powerful feature for ensuring partners or clients only see data relevant to them, even if you're sharing the same report with everyone.
• Manage Access Regularly: For any report or app, you can review who has access. In the share settings of a report, click on "More options" (...) and then Manage permissions to see a list of users. Here, you can revoke access for external (or internal) users who no longer need it.

Final Thoughts

Sharing your Power BI reports with external users is straightforward once you understand the necessary admin settings and choose the right method. Direct sharing is perfect for quick, ad-hoc requests, Power BI Apps provide a professional, finished experience for distributing collections of content, and embedding in SharePoint keeps insights within the context of a project. As long as you respect data security and avoid the "Publish to web" feature for anything sensitive, you can collaborate effectively and securely.

While managing users and permissions in Power BI is powerful, sometimes you need to get insights out faster without the setup. With us at Graphed you can securely share live dashboards with your team or clients with just a link. It's built on a foundation of natural language, meaning you can connect your data and create real-time reports just by describing what you want to see, taking the headache out of manual report building and complex permissions.