Power BI: How to Publish & Share a Report Using Power BI Service

Overview

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. ​

Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, clean, and model your data without affecting the underlying source, visualize (or discover) what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to publish and share reports, data sets, and dashboards from Power BI desktop to service online. 

Jump to:   Publishing   |   Sharing

Instructions

In order to publish to Power BI Service, you must first create a report using sets of data in Power BI Desktop. Once the report is created and ready to be made public, follow the steps below to publish the report. 

Part 1: Publishing to Power BI Service  

Power BI Service is the online version of the Power BI application. While useful, it only allows users the ability to make visual modifications to already created reports. To publish a report created in Power BI Desktop: 

  1. Open your completed report in Power BI Desktop and sign in to your UCO account in the top right.  
  2. On the Reports tab, click Publish. 
  3. Highlight the workspace you want to publish the report into and click Select. Remember, workspaces are like folders and folder permissions apply to anything saved in that folder/workspace. Pay attention to which workspace you add this report and who might have access once published. 
  4. Allow the system to process your request and, once complete, you will receive a Success! notification. 
  5. Click Open "your file name".pbix to view your report online in Power BI Service.
  6. This will show you what the report will look like and how it will interact with the individuals you share it with. This will show you your options for interacting with the saved reports and visuals. Remember that you cannot edit or transform the data from the online Service version of the app. This can only be done on a desktop and then republished to the web. 

Part 2: Share a Report with UCO Individuals 

Once a Power BI report, data set or dashboard has been added to your account on Power BI Service, you can easily share and manage permissions online. Follow these steps to share a report with others here at UCO. 

  1. Open Power BI Service by visiting app.powerbi.com and logging in using your UCO account. 
  2. Use the navigation on the left side of the screen to find and Select the workspace you published the Power Bi report into.
    • You will notice that each item stored in the workspace has an icon associated with it. The blue icon with the chart represents the final reports (a), the red icon with the cylinder represents the data sets used in a report (b), and the green icon with the speedometer represents dashboards (c). 
    • When a Power BI file from the Desktop version (.pbix) is published to Service, it is saved as two or three separate files. The data sets, report, and dashboard are all saved separately with the same file name as the original .pbix file.
    • Keep in mind, when sharing a Report with someone, in order for them to be able to edit the report, they will need to have permissions to access the data set as well, even though they will be unable to edit the dataset online. 
  3. Click the Share icon next to the report you want to share with others. 
  4. Within the share dialog window, you can select to:
    a) type in the textbox to select a specific individual(s) to share the report with or
    b) click to copy a generic link that you can share with anyone. 
  5. Select the top box to edit permissions that you enable with this access. 
  6. You can always edit, remove, or add additional access by selecting the ellipses icon next to the file name and clicking Manage permissions. 

Additional Resources

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