How to Share Power BI Link

Sharing your Power BI report is the final, crucial step after all your hard work connecting data sources, creating measures, and building visuals. Getting a link to send to your team or stakeholders should be simple, but the right way to do it depends entirely on who you’re sharing with and what you want them to do with it. This guide walks you through the different ways to share a Power BI link, explaining the best method for any situation.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Before You Share: A Quick Primer on Licenses and Permissions

Understanding who can see what is the first step to successful sharing. In the Power BI world, licensing often determines how you can share content and who can view it. Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Power BI Free: This license is for personal use. You can create reports for yourself, but you can't share them with other users within the Power BI service or view content shared by others (unless that content is hosted in a special "Premium capacity").
• Power BI Pro: This is the standard license for business users. To share a report and have someone else view it in their own Power BI account, both of you generally need a Pro license (or a Premium Per User license).
• Power BI Premium Per User (PPU): A step up from Pro, offering larger model sizes and advanced features. Sharing rules are similar to Pro, if you share a PPU report, the recipient also needs a PPU license.
• Power BI Premium (Capacity): This is a company-level license. When reports are stored in a workspace with Premium capacity, you can share them with anyone - even users with Free licenses - without them needing a Pro license. It's designed for large-scale distribution.

Knowing this will save you a lot of back-and-forth emails asking, "Why can't I open this link?" Most of the time, the answer is a licensing mismatch.

Method 1: Sharing a Direct Link to a Report or Dashboard

This is the most straightforward way to give a specific person access to a single report or dashboard. Think of it as the Power BI equivalent of sharing a Google Doc with a colleague.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

When to Use This Method

This approach is perfect for quick, ad-hoc sharing. Use it when you need to send a report to a small group of people for them to review, interact with, and explore the data on their own.

Step-by-Step Guide to Sharing a Direct Link

1. Navigate to the report or dashboard you want to share inside the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com).
2. Look for the Share button at the top of the interface. Click it.
3. A dialog box will appear. Here, you can enter the email addresses of the people or Microsoft 365 groups you want to share with.
4. Set the permissions. This is an important step. You can customize what recipients are allowed to do:
5. After setting your permissions, you can click Send. Alternatively, you can click Copy link at the bottom of the dialog. This generates a URL that you can paste into an email, Slack, or Teams message. If you use this option, you still need to manage who has access to that link through the same share menu.

Key Considerations

• Recipients must have a Power BI Pro or PPU license to view the content unless it's in a Premium capacity.
• This method grants view-only access to the report itself. Recipients can't edit your original report, but they can filter, slice, and interact with the visuals.
• If you gave them "build" permissions, they can use your dataset as a foundation for their own reports, which is great for promoting a single source of truth.

Method 2: Publish to Web (Creating a Public Link)

"Publish to web" generates a public link and an embed code that anyone can use to view your Power BI report. This method requires a strong word of caution because it bypasses all security and authentication.

When to Use This Method (with a Caveat)

This is the right choice only when your data is truly public and contains no confidential or proprietary information. It's ideal for embedding a data visualization on a public blog, a company website for public consumption (like a store locator map), or sharing open data with a wide audience.

Very Important: Do not use this method for sensitive internal data. Anyone on the internet with the link can see the report, and its content can even be indexed by search engines. Once it’s out there, it’s out there for good.

Step-by-Step Guide to Publishing to Web

1. Open your report in the Power BI service.
2. Go to File > Embed report > Publish to web (public).
3. Power BI will show a prominent warning. Read it carefully to understand the risks. If you are certain the data is not sensitive, click Create embed code.
4. Another confirmation dialog will appear. Click Publish.
5. You will now be given two things:

If this option is grayed out, it means your Power BI administrator has disabled public sharing for your organization - usually for good security reasons.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Method 3: Sharing via Power BI Apps

Power BI Apps are the best way to bundle a collection of related reports, dashboards, and workbooks into a single, polished package for broad distribution. This is the go-to method for formal, organization-wide reporting.

When to Use This Method

Use an app when you want to deliver a curated data experience to a large audience, like an entire department or the whole company. It provides a professional, user-friendly interface that hides all the back-end complexity of workspaces and datasets.

Step-by-Step Guide to Sharing an App Link

1. First, all your content must be in a single workspace.
2. Go to the workspace and click the Create app button in the top-right corner.
3. You'll be guided through a setup process with three tabs:
4. Once you're done, click Publish app.
5. After publishing, you'll be given a link to the app. You can copy this link and share it directly with your intended audience.

Key Considerations

• This is a highly scalable and manageable way to control permissions for hundreds of users.
• It offers a clean viewing experience for consumers, as they only see the reports you've curated for them.
• Updating the app is simple. You can make changes to reports in the workspace and then click "Update app" to push the changes live to all users.

Method 4: Sharing via Workspaces (for Collaboration)

This isn't about sharing a "view-only" link, it's about providing full collaborative access to the place where reports are built. Adding someone to a workspace is for team members who are co-creating and managing the content.

When to Use This Method

Use workspaces when you are working on a reporting project with other developers, analysts, or editors. It gives the team a shared environment to create, edit, publish, and manage reports and datasets together.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Step-by-Step Guide to Adding Users to a Workspace

1. Navigate to the workspace.
2. Click the Access button at the top of the pane.
3. Enter the email addresses of your collaborators.
4. Assign them a role. This is the most important part:
5. Click Add. The users will now be able to find the workspace under their "Workspaces" list in Power BI.

Instead of a direct link, you simply tell your collaborator to check their Power BI account for access to the new workspace.

Which Method Should You Choose? A Quick Comparison

Here’s a simple cheat sheet to help you decide on the best way to share your Power BI link.

Final Thoughts

Power BI offers a robust set of tools for sharing links, each designed for a different purpose - from sending a quick link to a teammate to publishing an app for your entire company. Choosing the right method comes down to understanding your audience, the sensitivity of your data, and whether you need to share a polished final product or a work-in-progress.

Wrangling and sharing data, even in powerful tools like Power BI, often involves connecting multiple disconnected sources first. That is why we created Graphed. Our platform is built to eliminate that initial friction by seamlessly integrating your sales and marketing data from platforms like Shopify, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Facebook Ads. Instead of manually building reports, you can use simple, natural language to create and share real-time dashboards in seconds, streamlining the entire process from data connection to insight sharing.