How to Share Power BI Dashboard

Creating a Power BI dashboard is only half the battle, the real value comes when you get those insights into the hands of the people who need them. Sharing your work should be simple, but the various options in Power BI can feel a bit overwhelming at first. This guide will walk you through the primary ways to share your Power BI dashboards, helping you choose the right method for your audience and security needs.

Before You Share: A Quick Checklist

Before you hit the share button, a little prep work can save a lot of headaches. Running through this quick checklist will make the process smoother and ensure your stakeholders have a great experience.

• Review Permissions and Licensing: To share a report, you and your recipients need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. If you're sharing with a broad audience that doesn't have Pro licenses, you'll need the dashboard to be in a workspace backed by a Power BI Premium capacity. Knowing who has what license will determine which sharing method is best.
• Ensure Your Data is Fresh: Is your dataset scheduled to refresh automatically? If not, perform a manual refresh so your viewers see the most up-to-date information. Nothing undermines a dashboard's credibility faster than stale data.
• Last-Minute Visual Check: Open the dashboard and give it one last review. Are all the visuals loading correctly? Is the layout clean on both desktop and mobile views? Test the filters and slicers to make sure they work as expected.
• Know Your Audience: Who are you sharing this with? A single colleague? An entire department? The entire company? The answer will help you decide between direct sharing, publishing an app, or embedding a report.

Understanding Workspaces: Your Collaboration Hub

In Power BI, almost all sharing and collaboration happens within a Workspace. You can’t properly share content without first understanding what a workspace is and how it functions. Think of a workspace as a shared folder or project area where you and your colleagues can create, modify, and manage a collection of dashboards, reports, datasets, and dataflows together.

When you create content in your personal "My Workspace," sharing options are limited. To effectively collaborate and share with a team, you need to publish your content to a shared workspace. Within a shared workspace, you can assign one of four roles to users, which dictates what they can do:

• Admin: Can do everything, including managing user permissions and updating or deleting the workspace itself.
• Member: Can add other members, publish and update content, and share items. This is a common role for team members who actively create and manage reports.
• Contributor: Can create, edit, and publish content within the workspace but cannot share it or manage user permissions. Ideal for people who build reports but shouldn't control distribution.
• Viewer: Can only view reports and dashboards and interact with them (e.g., using filters). They cannot see the underlying datasets or modify any content. This is the perfect role for end-users and stakeholders.

Understanding these roles is fundamental because they form the basis of your security and access control. Always start by putting your content in the correct workspace before considering your sharing strategy.

Method 1: Direct Sharing with Individuals and Groups

The most straightforward way to share a dashboard is by sharing it directly with specific people. This method sends a link via email and gives those individuals direct access to the dashboard.

When to Use This Method

This is the best option when you want to quickly share a single dashboard with a small, defined group of people, like your manager, a project stakeholder, or a few team members who all have Power BI Pro licenses.

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Navigate to the Power BI dashboard you wish to share (remember, it should be in a shared workspace, not "My Workspace").
2. In the top right corner of the dashboard, you’ll see a Share button. Click it.
3. In the "Share dashboard" window that appears, start typing the names or email addresses of the individuals or Microsoft 365 groups you want to share with. Power BI will search your organization's directory.
4. Next, you have a few options to configure:
5. Write a brief optional message to give your recipients context about what they are looking at.
6. Click Grant Access.

The recipients will receive an email and the dashboard will appear in their "Shared with me" section within the Power BI service.

Method 2: Publishing an App for Broad Distribution

If you need to distribute a collection of dashboards and reports to a larger audience, sharing each item individually is inefficient. This is where Power BI Apps come in. An "App" is a bundled package of content - dashboards, reports, and links - that provides a polished, professional, and branded experience for a large group of business users.

When to Use This Method

Publishing an App is the standard for formal, wide-scale distribution. Use it when you are sharing a finalized set of reports with a whole department, a project team, or even the entire organization. It provides a simple, structured view for consumers and prevents them from accessing the backend "clutter" of the source workspace.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating and Publishing an App

1. In your workspace, look for the Create app button in the top right corner.
2. Setup Tab: Give your app a name, description, and optionally upload a logo and change the theme color to match your company's branding.
3. Content Tab: Here you select the content that will be included in the app. Click + Add content and select the dashboards and reports from the current workspace you want to include. You can also reorder them to control the navigation experience.
4. Audience Tab: This is where you control access. Click on + New audience to create different audience groups. You can then name an audience (e.g., "Sales Team," "Leadership Team") and grant access to specific users or groups. The powerful feature here is you can show or hide specific content for each audience group, allowing you to create one app with tailored views for different teams.
5. In the audience section, enter the names of the individuals or groups who can access the app. Just below, you can choose whether to allow these users to connect to the app's underlying datasets.
6. Once you're satisfied, click Publish app in the top corner (you may have to click "Update app" if it's already published). Power BI will ask for confirmation. Click Publish.
7. A final window will appear with a direct link to the app. You can copy this link and send it out to your users directly, or they can find the app in the "Apps" section of Power BI service.

Method 3: Embedding for Wider Access (Websites and SharePoint)

Sometimes, your audience needs to see data within the tools they already use. Power BI's embedding capabilities allow you to place live, interactive reports inside of other platforms like a company website, a blog, or a SharePoint page.

Option A: Publish to Web (Public)

The "Publish to web" feature generates an embed code that allows you to post your Power BI report on a public website. Warning: Use this feature with extreme caution. When you publish to the web, the report and its data become publicly accessible on the internet. Anyone with the link can view it, no authentication is required. This method should never be used for confidential or proprietary data.

How to use it:

1. Open the report (not a dashboard) you want to embed.
2. Go to File > Embed report > Publish to web (public).
3. Read the security warning dialogue carefully. If your data is truly public, click Create embed code.
4. A final dialogue will provide a public link and an HTML embed code you can drop into a web page.

Option B: Embed in SharePoint Online (Secure)

A much more secure and common business practice is to embed reports in SharePoint Online. This integrates your BI directly into company intranets and project sites. Because it's a Microsoft ecosystem, permissions are managed automatically. Only users who already have permission to view the report in Power BI will be able to see it on the SharePoint page.

How to use it:

1. Open the Power BI report you want to embed.
2. Go to File > Embed report > SharePoint Online.
3. A small window will appear with a secure embed URL. Copy this link.
4. In SharePoint, edit the page where you want to add the report. Add a new web part and select "Power BI."
5. In the Power BI web part settings, click Add report.
6. Paste the embed link you copied from Power BI. The report will now render interactively within your SharePoint page, respecting all original security and permissions.

Method 4: Sharing via Links in Other Applications (like Microsoft Teams)

The goal of analytics is to drive action and conversation. A great way to do that is to bring data directly into collaboration hubs like Microsoft Teams. Rather than having to click a link and open a new window in the Power BI service, you can embed interactive reports and dashboards as a tab within a Teams channel.

To do this, simply open the report in Power BI, copy the URL from your web browser's address bar, and then you can either paste this link into a chat or add it as a new "Power BI" tab to a Teams channel, making the report a persistent part of your team's workspace.

Final Thoughts

Sharing your Power BI dashboards is a critical last step in the analytics process, and choosing the right method comes down to your audience and security needs. For quick, informal sharing with a few colleagues, direct sharing works perfectly. For distributing a finished, polished report to a large department or the entire company, publishing a Power BI App is the best practice. Finally, embedding lets you bring insights directly into the workflows your team uses every day.

We know that even with the right tools, managing permissions, versions, and different modes of sharing can sometimes feel like a full-time job. At our company, we focus on simplifying this whole process from the moment you connect your data. With Graphed, you can securely share live dashboards with team members, clients, or stakeholders with a simple link - no complex app configurations needed. Because everyone sees the same real-time data, you can stop dealing with access issues and get back to making data-driven decisions faster.