How to Create a Link for Power BI Dashboard

Creating a beautiful Power BI dashboard is only half the battle, the real value comes when you share those insights with your team, clients, or stakeholders. If you're wondering how to turn your interactive report into a simple, shareable link, you're in the right place. This guide will walk you through the exact steps to create and manage links for your Power BI dashboards and reports, detailing the different permission levels and sharing options available.

First Things First: Prerequisites for Sharing

Before you can share your masterpiece, you need a few things in place. Sharing isn't available on the free version of Power BI Desktop, it's a feature of the Power BI Service. Here’s what you and your recipients will need:

• A Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) License: To share content, you need a paid Power BI license. Recipients also need a Pro/PPU license to view the shared content, although a free license user can access content if it's hosted in a Premium capacity workspace.
• Content in a Workspace: While you can build reports in your personal "My Workspace," you need to publish them to a shared workspace to collaborate and share effectively.
• Appropriate Admin Permissions: Your Power BI administrator can set tenant-wide rules about who can share what. If you don't see the sharing options described below, it's possible your organization has restricted these features. The most common settings an admin might disable are "Publish to Web" and "Allow users to share content with external users."

How to Create a Shareable Link in Power BI Service: A Step-by-Step Guide

The most direct way to share a report or dashboard is by generating a specific link for your colleagues. This method gives you granular control over who sees your work and what they can do with it.

Step 1: Navigate to Your Report or Dashboard

Log into the Power BI Service at app.powerbi.com. On the left pane, find the workspace containing the content you wish to share and click on it. From there, open the specific report or dashboard.

Step 2: Find and Click the 'Share' Button

Once you have your content open, look for the Share button located in the top action bar. It's usually represented by an icon of a person with a plus sign or an arrow. Clicking this will open the "Share report" dialog box, where the magic happens.

Step 3: Configure Your Sharing and Permission Settings

The "Share" dialog gives you several options to define who can access your content and how. Let’s break down the most common scenario: sharing with specific people.

Sharing with Specific People

This is the default and most secure option. It ensures only the people you explicitly name can access your content.

1. In the "Share" pop-up, you'll see a field to enter names or email addresses. Start typing the email addresses of the colleagues you want to share with, whether they are inside or outside your organization.
2. Below the address field, review the permission options.
3. You can also add an optional message to give your colleagues context about the report you're sending.
4. Click Send. Your selected recipients will receive an email with a direct link to the report.

Copying a Link Instead of Sending an Email

Sometimes you don't want Power BI to send an email, you just want a link you can paste into Slack, Microsoft Teams, or your own email draft. To do this, click the "Copy link" tab at the top of the Share dialog, or click the copy link icon.

This reveals a few more options about the kind of link you can generate:

• People in your organization: Generates a link that anyone at your company can use to view the report. This is useful for broadly sharing non-sensitive information like a general company performance dashboard.
• People with existing access: Creates a link for users who already have permission. It's a convenient way to send the link again without altering any access settings.
• Specific people: This functions just like the default sharing option, but instead of sending an email, it generates a unique link tied to the specific people you list. This is the link you'll copy and paste.

After selecting an option, click Apply, then click the Copy button to grab your link.

Alternative Ways to Share Your Power BI Content

Creating a direct link isn't the only way to distribute your work. Depending on your audience and security needs, one of these methods might be a better fit.

Publish to Web (For Public Data Only!)

This option creates a public link and an embed code that anyone on the internet can use to view and interact with your report. This is a fantastic tool for sharing visualizations for a blog post, public website, or portfolio.

Heads up: Be extremely careful with this feature. Once published, the data is publicly visible, and you should never use it for confidential or proprietary information.

To use it:

1. With your report open, go to File > Embed report > Publish to web (public).
2. A dialog will appear with a strong warning about a public link. If you're certain the data is not sensitive, click Create embed code.
3. Another dialog box will appear. Click Publish.
4. Power BI will provide you with a public URL you can share and an HTML snippet you can use to embed the report on a website.

Bundle Content with Power BI Apps

If you have a collection of related dashboards, reports, and datasets, sharing them one by one can be cumbersome. This is where Power BI Apps shine. An app bundles that content into a single package that you can publish to your entire organization or specific groups.

This is the best practice for broad, controlled distribution within your company. It gives users a polished, easy-to-navigate experience without giving them edit access to the underlying reports in the workspace.

To create one, navigate to your workspace and click the Create app button in the top right. From there, you'll guide yourself through adding content, branding, navigation, and setting permissions for the audience.

Embed in SharePoint Online or a Secure Portal

For internal use, a very common need is to display a report within an existing team site or portal. Power BI integrates seamlessly with SharePoint Online. You can drop a live, fully interactive Power BI report directly onto a SharePoint page for your team to see right where they already work.

Go to your report and select File > Embed report > SharePoint Online. This generates a special URL. Then, in SharePoint, add the "Power BI" web part to a page and paste the URL into it.

Managing Access and Troubleshooting

Sharing is great, but management is crucial. What if someone leaves the project, or you sent a link to the wrong person?

How to Check and Revoke Access

You can easily see who has access to your content and revoke it if necessary.

1. In the workspace, find the report or dashboard and click the three-dot menu (...) next to its name.
2. Select Manage permissions.
3. This will open a panel showing who has "Direct access" as well as any sharable links you've created. Click the three dots next to a user's name or a link to modify or remove their access entirely.

Common Sharing Issues

• "The sharing option is greyed out." This usually means your Power BI Tenant Admin has disabled sharing for certain users or groups. You'll need to contact your IT department or admin.
• "My colleague can open the link but sees blank visuals." This classic issue happens when the user has permission to the report but not to the underlying dataset. When sharing, make sure you decide whether to grant them Build permissions, or ensure the dataset itself is separately shared with them.
• "The external user I invited can't open the link." Your admin may have disabled sharing with external "guest" users. This is a common security measure. Also, double-check that the user has a Power BI license to view the content.

Final Thoughts

Sharing in Power BI is a flexible and powerful feature that transforms static data into a collaborative conversation. Whether you're sending a direct link for a quick review, publishing a public visual, or deploying a comprehensive app, the key is to choose the method that best matches your audience and security requirements while paying close attention to who has permission to both the report and its underlying data.

While mastering traditional BI tools like Power BI is a valuable skill, it often comes with a steep learning curve related to data modeling, report building, and permission management. We built Graphed to remove that friction. By connecting your marketing and sales data sources in seconds, you can create real-time dashboards and reports simply by asking for what you need in plain English. No more wrestling with field lists or manually linking tables, just describe the dashboard you want, and an AI data analyst builds it instantly and keeps it updated, making sharing actionable insights faster and easier for your entire team.