How to Lock Power BI Dashboard

Building a powerful dashboard in Power BI is a rewarding experience, but sharing it can bring on a new set of worries. You want your colleagues to see the insights, but you don't want them accidentally moving visuals, changing filters, or breaking the careful layout you created. This article will show you several ways to lock your Power BI dashboard and reports, ensuring your audience has a clean, controlled, and read-only experience.

What Does "Locking" Mean in Power BI?

Unlike a locked file in other applications, Power BI doesn't have a single "lock" button. Instead, "locking" refers to a combination of settings and sharing methods you use to control what users can see and do. Your goal is usually one or more of the following:

• Prevent Editing: Stop users from changing the dashboard's design, moving charts, or altering the underlying report's structure.
• Restrict Access: Ensure only specific people or groups can view the content.
• Secure Data: Limit the data a user sees within the report based on their role (for example, showing a sales manager only their team's data).
• Guide the User Experience: Control how users can interact with filters and slicers to guide them through a specific analytical path you've designed.

Fortunately, Power BI provides robust tools to achieve all of these goals. The most effective method depends on who your audience is and how you want them to consume your data.

Method 1: The Best Practice - Publishing a Power BI App

For distributing reports and dashboards to a broad audience of view-only consumers, Power BI Apps are the industry standard and the best way to create a "locked" experience. Think of a Workspace as your workshop where you build and refine everything. The App is the finished product you put in the showroom for everyone to use.

When you publish an App, you're distributing a copy of your content that end-users cannot edit. They can interact with slicers and filters as you've allowed, but the core structure is locked down.

Step-by-Step Guide to Publishing an App:

1. Prepare your Workspace: Ensure your final report, the dataset, and any related dashboards are all in a single Power BI Workspace. Don't publish from your personal "My Workspace," as it's not designed for collaboration or distribution.

2. Create the App: In your Workspace, look for the "Create app" button in the upper right corner. Clicking this will begin the publishing process.

3. Configure the Setup Tab:

• App name and description: Give your app a clear name and a helpful description so users know what it's for.
• Support contact: Add your contact info.
• Color and logo: Customize the app's appearance to match your brand.

4. Add Content in the Navigation Tab: Here, you decide which dashboards and reports from the Workspace to include in the App. You can choose the order and even create sections to organize the content for your users. Crucially, you can also add links to other resources if needed. This allows you to build a curated navigation experience, guiding users exactly where you want them to go.

5. Set Permissions in the Permissions Tab: This is the most critical step for locking your dashboard.

• Specify users or groups: Decide who gets to see the App. You can enter individual email addresses or, more efficiently, use Office 365 Groups, Distribution lists, or Mail-Enabled Security Groups.
• Advanced Settings: Expand the advanced settings for two key lock-down options:

6. Publish the App: Once you're satisfied with the configuration, click "Publish app." Power BI will give you a shareable link that you can send to your audience. When they open it, they'll see your professional, polished, and - most importantly - non-editable dashboard.

Method 2: Securing Data with Row-Level Security (RLS)

Sometimes, locking the visuals isn't enough, you need to lock the data itself. Row-Level Security (RLS) ensures users only see the data they are authorized to see, even when everyone is looking at the exact same report.

For example, a regional manager for North America should only see sales data for the US and Canada, while the European manager sees data for Europe. RLS makes this possible within a single report.

How to Set Up RLS:

The process starts in Power BI Desktop before you publish your report.

1. Create Roles in Power BI Desktop

• Go to the Modeling tab in the ribbon.
• Click "Manage Roles."
• In the window that appears, click "Create" to add a new role (e.g., "North America Manager").
• Select the table you want to apply a filter to (e.g., the 'Sales' table).
• In the Table filter DAX expression box, write a simple rule. This expression must return a true/false value. For example:

[Region] = "USA" || [Region] = "Canada"

This DAX formula filters the table to only show rows where the 'Region' column is "USA" or "Canada." Create as many roles as you need (e.g., a "Europe Manager" role with [Region] = "Germany" || [Region] = "France").

2. Test the Roles Before publishing, use the "View as" button (also on the Modeling tab) to test your roles. Select one of the roles you created, and your report will temporarily update to show you what a user assigned to that role would see. This is essential for verifying your DAX filters work correctly.

3. Assign Users in the Power BI Service

• After publishing your report to the Power BI service, navigate to the Workspace.
• Find the dataset (not the report) associated with your RLS roles and click the three-dot menu (...), then select "Security."
• You will see the roles you created in Desktop. Select a role, and a field will appear to the right where you can type in the email addresses of the users or groups you want to assign to that role.
• Click "Add," and then "Save."

Now, when a user assigned to the "North America Manager" role opens the report or App, every visual will automatically be filtered to show only data for the USA and Canada.

Method 3: Direct Sharing and Other Quick Controls

Publishing an App is best for broad audiences, but for quick, one-off shares with a small number of people, you can share a single report directly.

Sharing a Report with Specific Permissions

When you click the "Share" button on a report in the Power BI Service, a dialog box opens with powerful options:

1. Choose your audience ("People in your organization," "Specific people," etc.).
2. Click the settings icon to open the permissions menu.
3. Here you can fine-tune access:

• Allow recipients to share this report: Uncheck this to prevent the people you share with from passing the link on to others.
• Allow recipients to build content with the data associated with this report: Uncheck this to stop them from connecting to your dataset. This is a very common way that an experience can become "unlocked," so this is a great step to keeping everything clean and precise.

While this method works, it can become difficult to manage if you're sharing with many individuals. Apps scale more cleanly for team-wide and company-wide distribution.

Customizing Visual Interactions

A "locked" experience also feels polished and predictable. In Power BI Desktop, you can control how visuals talk to each other to prevent confusing interactions for your users.

• Select a visual in Power BI Desktop.
• Go to the Format tab in the ribbon.
• Click on "Edit interactions."
• Now, select another visual on your canvas. Little icons will appear in the corner of all other visuals. You can choose whether the selected visual filters, highlights, or does nothing to the others.

Setting this up thoughtfully ensures that when a user clicks on a chart, the report behaves in a logical way, reinforcing the guided analytical path you designed.

Final Thoughts

Locking a Power BI dashboard isn't a single action but a thoughtful process of distribution and security shaping. Using Power BI Apps is the most effective way to share read-only content broadly, while Row-Level Security is essential for creating a single report that serves personalized data to different users securely. By combining these methods, you can deliver a professional, stable, and perfectly controlled analytics experience for your team.

Managing workspaces, configuring permissions, and setting up roles in complex tools like Power BI can be a time-consuming process with a significant learning curve. At Graphed, we simplify this process entirely. You can connect your marketing and sales data sources in seconds and then use simple, natural language to create the exact dashboards you need. Instead of wrestling with security settings, you just ask our AI data analyst to build a report and can securely share those real-time dashboards with your team instantly. It's the most intuitive way for anyone - technical or not - to get from data chaos to clear answers. Explore the power of natural language for building your financial analytics by getting a free trial of Graphed today!