How to View Power BI Report as Someone Else

One of the most powerful features in Power BI is its ability to show different data to different people using the same report. This means you can create a single master report for your entire sales team, but each sales representative will only see their own leads and deals. This article will walk you through exactly how to set up these permissions using Row-Level Security (RLS) and how to use the "View as" feature to test your report from another user's perspective.

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What is Power BI Row-Level Security (RLS)?

Row-Level Security (RLS) is a data governance feature in Power BI that restricts data access for specific users at the data row level. Instead of creating separate reports for different regions or teams, you can build one report and then define rules that filter the data based on who is logged in and viewing it. This ensures that users see only the data an organization has authorized them to see.

Imagine you have a sales dashboard that covers global performance. Without RLS, everyone who opens the report sees all the data - sales figures from North America, Europe, and Asia. With RLS, you can create a "North America" role and assign it to your North American sales team. When they open the exact same report, the data is automatically filtered to show only performance for the United States and Canada.

There are two primary ways to implement RLS in Power BI:

• Static RLS: You create a separate rule for each specific role you want to create - for example, you would create a "USA" rule, then a "Canada" rule, then a "Germany" rule. This is great for a smaller number of rules that rarely change. It’s hard to scale and requires IT or data team intervention when a rule needs an update or someone's permissions change.
• Dynamic RLS: You create one rule that dynamically checks the viewer's username (User Principal Name) against a permissions list (a user details lookup table in your data). Once set up, data access is dynamic, updated automatically, and highly scalable. People can even get moved around to other teams or departments and this dynamic setup will still show them just the facts relevant to them - without getting IT or engineering involved. Pretty neat!

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Why You Absolutely Need to Test Your Power BI Roles

Creating roles is only half the battle. If you don't test them properly, you could be accidentally sharing sensitive information with the wrong people. The "View as" feature is your built-in safety check. It allows you to impersonate a role or a specific user to confirm your rules are working exactly as intended.

Here’s why testing is not just a nice-to-have, but a necessity:

• Verify Data Security: The primary reason is to ensure your security rules are airtight. Do sales reps only see their own data? Do regional managers only see data for their regions? Testing prevents accidental data leaks.
• Check the User Experience: A report can look completely different when viewed with filtered data. Visuals might break, KPIs might show empty values, or the layout might look strange. Testing lets you see the report exactly as your end-user will, so you can fix any formatting or functional issues.
• Troubleshoot DAX Rules: Row-Level Security rules are written in DAX (Data Analysis Expressions). It's easy to make a small mistake in your formula. The "View as" feature provides instant visual feedback, helping you quickly spot if your DAX logic is flawed.
• Ensure Compliance: In many industries, data privacy is a strict legal requirement. Properly implementing and testing RLS helps keep your company compliant with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA by proving you have controls in place to restrict access to sensitive data on a need-to-know basis.

Step 1: Setting Up Your Roles in Power BI Desktop

Before you can test a report from someone else's perspective, you first need to define what that perspective looks like. This is done by creating roles and then writing the DAX rules that govern what data those roles can see. For this example, let's assume we have a simple sales report with data from multiple countries, and we want to create a role for our sales team in the United Kingdom.

Go to "Manage Roles"

Open your report in Power BI Desktop. In the main ribbon at the top, navigate to the Modeling tab and click on Manage roles.

Create a New Role

The "Manage roles" window will appear. Here, you can create, modify, or delete roles.

1. Click the Create button to add a new role.
2. Give your role a descriptive name. For our example, let's call it "UK Sales Team".

Define the Rule Using a DAX Filter Expression

Now, you need to tell Power BI how to filter the data for this role.

1. In the "Tables" section of the "Manage roles" window, find the table that contains the data you want to filter. In our case, it's likely a table named Sales or Geography. Let’s assume the country information is in a table called Sales.
2. Click the ellipsis (...) next to the Sales table name and select Add filter. Then, select the column you want to filter on. In this case, it’s the [Country] column.
3. In the "Table filter DAX expression" box, write the DAX formula that defines your rule. You want to filter the Sales table to only show rows where the Country is "United Kingdom". The DAX for this is quite simple:

[Country] = "United Kingdom"

Click Save when you are finished. Your "Manage roles" window should now look something like this:

You can create as many roles as you need. For instance, you could add another role called "USA Sales Team" with the rule [Country] = "United States". For dynamic RLS, you'd use a function like USERPRINCIPALNAME() to match the logged-in user's email to a column in your employee table, like [EmailAddress] = USERPRINCIPALNAME().

Step 2: Using "View as" to Test Your Report in Power BI Desktop

Now for the fun part! With your "UK Sales Team" role created, you can now use the "View as" feature to impersonate that role and see the report through their eyes.

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Access the "View as" Feature

In the Modeling tab, right next to where you clicked "Manage roles," you'll see a button called View as. Click it.

Select the Role to Test

The "View as roles" dialog box opens, displaying all the roles you've created. To test our role, simply check the box next to UK Sales Team. You also have the option to combine multiple roles to see how the report looks when a user belongs to several groups.

For dynamic RLS, this is where you can test a specific user. You would check the "Other user" box and enter the email address (UPN) of the person whose view you want to test. For our static example, we just need to select the role itself.

Click OK.

Analyze the Filtered Report

Power BI will immediately re-render the report. A yellow banner will appear at the top of the screen confirming which role you are viewing as: "Now viewing the report as UK Sales Team."

All the visuals on your report page - from maps and KPI cards to tables and charts - should now be filtered to show data only for the United Kingdom. If you have a map visual, only the UK should be highlighted. If you have a card showing total revenue, it should now display the UK's revenue, not the global total. This is your chance to click through all the pages and visuals to make sure everything looks correct and that no data outside of the UK is visible.

Stop Viewing the Role

Once you’ve confirmed the role is working correctly, simply click the Stop viewing button on the right side of the yellow banner. The report will return to its original, unfiltered state showing all the data.

If the report didn't filter as expected, it's time to troubleshoot. Go back into "Manage roles" and double-check your DAX expression for typos or logical errors.

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Step 3: Assigning Users and Testing in the Power BI Service

After you've tested your roles locally in Power BI Desktop, the final steps are to publish your report and assign actual users to those roles in the Power BI Service.

Publish Your Report

From the "Home" tab in Power BI Desktop, click Publish and select a workspace to publish your report and its associated dataset to the Power BI Service.

Assign Users to Roles

Next, you’ll need to assign employees and members to each associated account. Log in to your account at app.powerbi.com and go to the workspace where you published your report.

1. Find the dataset for your report (not the report itself - security is managed at the dataset level).
2. Click the ellipsis (...) next to the dataset name and select Security.
3. You'll see a list of the roles you created in Power BI Desktop (e.g., "UK Sales Team"). Select the role you want to manage.
4. In the "Members" box, start typing the email addresses of the users or organization security groups that you want to assign to this role and select to add them. Power BI's RLS also allows for assigning security groups managed in your email provider, i.e., Azure’s Active Directory service or from within the Microsoft Admin Center.
5. When you are finished adding people and security groups to a role, click to save your newly defined rules for each user access level's settings before moving on to setting other user access levels. When you’ve checked each access role, you have completed the assignment procedure.

Best Practices When Managing Power BI Roles

• Use security groups: Wherever possible you should assign security groups - rather than individuals - to a Power BI role. Managing a changing team can become a massive time-suck when you are manually adding and taking away people at the file report level. But when you set rules connected to a larger organization's security groups, a person's permission and access status can get magically updated without you messing with the BI settings - the permission role gets changed more efficiently from one single source, leaving your hands free of a very frequent toilsome task.
• Always plan ahead: Before diving into making specific roles in Power BI, be sure it is as simple as possible. Draw out your hierarchy on paper with a pen first. The more time you take early on, the more trouble it will likely save you in the long run. Planning your RLS roles will let it work like a charm, a lack of a clear plan may set it running out-of-control. It pays to make clear upfront who does what and who is seeing (and not seeing) certain things.
• Test all roles carefully: Make sure to get all your rules done before giving anyone public access to the reports. Test each role on its own, also considering a person who might have to cross roles for whatever reason. You can do the testing while making these by simply checking various boxes when they ask you to test with "View as." Make sure everyone's views are correct, not just "no issues encountered."

Final Thoughts

Mastering Row-Level Security and a report's "View As" feature together transforms the function of Power BI reports from being merely informative into interactive, highly secure documents. Having the peace of mind of building out secure, personalized data so that one's colleagues see only pertinent information goes a long way in turning a single file into everyone's trusted tool. While no amount of BI can make work easier for everyone, designing reports to work seamlessly to accommodate what each different type of consumer might like is key.

At Graphed, we simplify the process of creating and managing these reports. Instead of spending hours manually aggregating data, you can rely on our platform to quickly generate custom dashboards with just a few straightforward questions. Let us help you streamline your data insights, freeing you up to focus on what truly matters.