How to Share Power BI Reports with Your Colleagues (Easy)

Written by co-founder Kasper Langmann, Microsoft Office Specialist.

Knowing how to share a Power BI report with your colleagues is important.

After all, your findings and insights would be pretty useless if you wouldn’t be able to share them with your organization.

Fortunately, it’s super easy to do.

In this article, we’ll give you a quick walkthrough on how you can securely share your Power BI reports with your colleagues.

Kasper Langmann, Co-founder of Spreadsheeto

Let’s go! 👍

*This tutorial is for Power BI Online (also called "Power BI Service").

Table of Content

Introduction to Sharing Power BI Reports

After successfully creating your reports, the usual next step is to distribute and share them with your colleagues.

But before you can share anything in Power BI, you need two things:

  • A Power BI Pro license
  • Power BI Service

Basically, there are 3 pricing levels in Power BI — Free, Pro, and Premium. To share content, you need a Power BI Pro license. Free users can only consume content that’s in Power BI Premium capacity.

Also, to share content, you need to use the Power BI Service (the online version). This is one of the key differences between Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service.

Once you got them, it’s time to share your reports! 😊 The good thing is, it’s easy to spot the ‘Share’ button within Power BI Service.

Kasper Langmann, Co-founder of Spreadsheeto

Sharing a Power BI Report

To share a report, click the ‘Share’ button while on report reading view:

Sharing a report while on reading view

It’s also possible to share a report straight from your workspace:

Sharing a report from the workspace

Whichever you choose, both will open a right sidebar where you can set up who can access the report.

Kasper Langmann, Co-founder of Spreadsheeto

Power BI will also remind you that only users with Power BI Pro can access the content.

To finish it up, all you have to do is enter the email addresses of those who you would like to share the reports with as well as add a message if you like.

Also, check (or uncheck) the settings about allowing the recipients to share the report, build new content, and send them email notifications.

If you like, you can also copy the report link and message it to your colleagues.

Once you’re ready, hit ‘Share’:

If you try and enter an email address that’s not within your company domain, Power BI will remind you.

After that, your recipients would receive a notification about the shared report.

Fast and easy! 👍

Limitations and Considerations

There are certain limitations and considerations when sharing a report:

  • If RLS (Row-Level Security) is applied, the credential of the user you invited will determine the data they can access or see.
  • By default, those you shared with can view your report in the reading view. But if you allow them to build new content with the underlying datasets, then they can create their own reports.
  • Though they can’t see the assets directly, they can still access them using the ‘Analyze in Excel’ feature. If you don’t like that, you can’t restrict that ability.
  • Everyone can refresh the data manually.
  • If your organization is using Office 365 for email, you can enter the email address associated with the distribution group and everyone on that group will be invited.
  • If your colleagues already have access to the report, you can simply send them the report link.

Conclusion

As you can see, it’s easy to share Power BI reports with others. If you’re used to sharing content on other platforms, you’ll find this process fairly similar.

In addition, if your team needs to work together, you might have to create a Power BI workspace. This way, you don’t have to manually share the reports by yourself and you can also set up the roles each user will have. 😊

Kasper Langmann, Co-founder of Spreadsheeto