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How to Publish Power BI Desktop to Web

Cody Schneider•

You’ve built an insightful report in Power BI Desktop, transforming raw data into beautiful, compelling charts and graphs. Now comes the big question: how do you share it with people outside your organization? Publishing your Power BI report to the web allows you to create a public link or embed it directly onto your website, making your data accessible to a wider audience. This guide provides a step-by-step walkthrough of the entire process, from your desktop to a live, public web page.

Heads Up: Key Considerations Before Making Your Data Public

Before you copy and paste that embed code, it’s vital to understand what publishing to the web means. When you use Power BI’s "Publish to web (public)" feature, you are creating a version of your report that anyone on the internet can view. They do not need a Power BI account, and they do not need to be signed in. They just need the link.

Think of it like uploading a video to YouTube and setting it to "Public." The URL might be long and hard to guess, but if someone finds it, they can see everything. Because of this, you should never, ever use this feature for sensitive or confidential data.

  • DO NOT PUBLISH: Customer information, financial performance, sales team leaderboards, internal company metrics, or any proprietary data that you wouldn’t want your competitors to see.

  • OK TO PUBLISH: Public-facing data like survey results, open government data, generalized market trends, sports statistics, or non-profit impact reports.

Once a report is published, the data it contains is considered public. Always triple-check that your report contains only information you are comfortable sharing with the world.

Step 1: Publishing Your Report from Power BI Desktop to the Service

The journey from your desktop to the web always begins by publishing your report to the Power BI Service, which is the cloud-based portion of Power BI. You cannot generate a public web link directly from the Desktop application.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Sign In to Your Account: Inside the Power BI Desktop app, make sure you are signed into your Power BI account. You can check this in the top-right corner of the window. If you aren't signed in, you won't be able to publish.

  2. Click the Publish Button: With your report open and saved, go to the Home tab on the ribbon. On the far right, you will see a Publish button. Click it.

  3. Select a Workspace: A dialog box will appear asking you to select a destination for your report. A workspace is like a folder in the Power BI Service where your reports, dashboards, and datasets are stored.

    • My workspace is your personal sandbox. It's a great place to publish a report before you're ready to share it with your team. For this public sharing purpose, publishing here is perfectly fine.

    • If you are a part of a larger organization, you may see other shared workspaces used for collaborating with colleagues.

Choose the appropriate workspace and click Select. 4. Wait for Confirmation: Power BI will then upload your report and its associated data model to the cloud. This might take a few moments. Once it’s finished, you’ll see a success message with a link to open the report directly in the Power BI Service. Go ahead and click that link. It’s time to generate our public link!

Step 2: Generating Your Public Embed Code in Power BI Service

Now that your report is living in the Power BI Service (accessible through your web browser at app.powerbi.com), you can create the public embed code.

Here’s how to find the magic "Publish to web" button:

  1. Open Your Report: Navigate to the workspace where you published your report and open it.

  2. Find the Embed Option: In the top navigation bar, click on File > Embed report > Publish to web (public).

  3. Review the Important Warning: Power BI will display a prominent warning reminding you about the security implications of making a report public. This is your final chance to make sure you’re not sharing private data. Take a moment to read it. If you are confident the data is safe to share, click Create embed code.

  4. Publish: You'll see one final confirmation prompt. Click Publish.

  5. Get Your Link and Code: A success window will now pop up with the assets you need. You have two options:

    • A direct link that you can send to people to view the report in a full-screen browser window.

    • An HTML snippet (iframe code) that you can paste directly into the source code of your website, blog post, or anywhere that accepts HTML.

You can now copy whichever one you need. Congratulations, your report is officially public!

Step 3: Customizing and Managing Your Published Report

Once you get the code, there are a few extra things you can do to manage and customize the experience for your viewers.

Using the Public Link

The first option - the straightforward link - is the simplest. Just copy it and share it via email, social media, or any other channel. When someone clicks it, they’ll see a version of your interactive report. They'll have access to any slicers or filters you've included, allowing them to explore the data you’ve presented.

Embedding the Report in Your Website (Using the iframe)

The second option is the most powerful for integration. An iframe (Inline Frame) acts like a window on your webpage that displays content from another source - in this case, your Power BI report.

Here’s a sample embed code: <iframe title="My Sample Report - Page 1" width="800" height="600" src="https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=ey..." frameborder="0" allowFullScreen="true"></iframe>

You can simply paste this code into your website's HTML editor. A couple of quick tips:

  • Adjust the Size: You can change the width and height attributes within the iframe tag to make the embedded report fit your page design better. You can use pixels (e.g., width="1140") or percentages (e.g., width="100%").

  • Default Page: Your embed code will default to showing the page that was active when you generated the code. You can also customize which page shows by default by cycling through the pages in the Power BI Service UI before you copy the code.

Managing and Deleting Embed Codes

What if you accidentally published confidential data or need to take an old report offline? You must delete the embed code from within the Power BI Service. Simply removing the report from your workspace does not disable the public link.

To manage your codes:

  1. In the Power BI Service, click the Settings gear icon in the top-right corner.

  2. Select Manage embed codes.

  3. This screen will show you every single report you’ve published to the web. Find the one you want to remove, click the ellipses (…), and select Delete. The public link will almost immediately stop working.

Troubleshooting Common "Publish to Web" Issues

Sometimes things don't go as planned. Here are answers to a couple of common hurdles.

The "Publish to web" Option Is Grayed Out or Missing

This is almost always a security setting controlled by your company's Power BI Administrator. By default, many organizations disable public publishing to prevent accidental data leaks. If you don't see the option, you'll need to reach out to your Power BI admin or IT department and ask them to enable the "Publish to web" tenant setting. They may only enable it for specific security groups, so you may need to request access.

My Published Report Is Not Showing the Latest Data

Reports published to the web are cached to improve performance. According to Microsoft's documentation, cached reports may take up to an hour to be refreshed. If you've updated the source report in the Power BI Service, be patient - the changes will eventually be reflected in your public version. This is different from the dataset refresh schedule, even if your dataset refreshes instantly, the public cache update has its own cycle.

Final Thoughts

This covers the complete workflow for publishing a Power BI report to the web: build in Desktop, upload to the Service, generate a public code, and manage it responsibly. The key takeaway is to have a robust understanding of data security - use this feature for genuinely public information, and you'll find it's a fantastic way to share insights.

For us at Graphed , making data sharing and dashboard creation intuitive is core to what we do. While Power BI is an incredibly deep tool, we know teams often spend more time wrestling with settings and configurations than they do acting on insights. Our platform is built on simplicity, connecting directly to your marketing and sales tools like Shopify, Google Analytics, and Salesforce, and allowing you to create shareable, real-time dashboards just by asking questions. It's about bringing data analysis back to everyday language, giving you the power to create and share your reports in seconds, not hours.