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Where Can I Publish Power BI Reports?

Cody Schneider••8 min read

You're connected your data, built your measures, and designed a visually appealing report in Power BI Desktop. The next crucial step is getting it into the hands of the people who need it. This article walks you through the various ways you can publish and share your Power BI reports, from secure internal sharing to displaying your data on a public website.

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The Foundation: Publishing to the Power BI Service

For most users, the primary destination for any report built in Power BI Desktop is the Power BI Service. This is Microsoft's cloud-based platform where you can centralize, share, and collaborate on your reports. Think of Power BI Desktop as the kitchen where you prepare the meal, and the Power BI Service as the dining room where you serve it.

Publishing your report is the first and most essential step in the sharing process. It moves a copy of your work from your local computer to the cloud, making it accessible from anywhere and enabling all the sharing features that follow.

How to Publish from Power BI Desktop

The process is straightforward. Once your report is ready, follow these steps:

  1. Save your report: Always make sure you have the latest version of your work saved (.pbix file).
  2. Click the "Publish" button: You'll find this on the "Home" tab of the ribbon at the top of the PBI Desktop window.
  3. Sign in: If you aren't already signed into your Power BI account, a prompt will appear asking for your credentials.
  4. Select a destination: A dialog box will pop up listing the available workspaces in your Power BI Service account. You can choose "My Workspace" for personal reports or an "App Workspace" for collaborative projects.
  5. Wait for Success: Power BI will upload your report and dataset. Once it's done, you'll see a success message with a link. You can click this link to open the report directly in your web browser within the Power BI Service.

Once published, your report is live in the cloud. Now you can move on to the actual sharing and distribution.

Sharing Published Reports With Internal Teams

After your report is in the Power BI Service, you have several methods for securely sharing it with colleagues and collaborators within your organization. The method you choose depends on your audience and how you want them to consume the information.

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1. Direct Sharing for Individuals and Small Groups

The simplest way to share a report is by sending a direct link to specific people. This method is ideal for one-off sharing or when you need to give access to just a few team members.

From the Power BI Service, open your report and look for the "Share" button at the top. When you click it, you'll have a few options:

  • Grant recipients access: Enter the names or email addresses of your colleagues.
  • Set permissions: You can control what the recipients can do. You can allow them to reshare the report, and more importantly, you can grant them "Build" permissions, which lets them create new reports using the underlying dataset.
  • Send an email notification: By default, Power BI sends an email to the recipients with a link to the report. You can customize the message.

Direct sharing is quick and easy, but it can become difficult to manage if you need to give access to dozens of people or manage different levels of permissions.

2. Publishing a Power BI App for Broad Audiences

When you need to distribute a collection of reports and dashboards to a larger team, department, or even the entire organization, a Power BI App is the best practice. An app bundles related content into a polished, professional package, providing a simpler and more guided experience for your end-users.

The beauty of an app is that it separates the authoring experience (in the workspace) from the consumption experience (in the app). This means you can continue working on and updating your reports in the workspace without constantly disturbing the end-users.

How to Create a Power BI App:

  1. Navigate to the collaborative workspace containing your reports and dashboards.
  2. Click the "Create app" button in the top-right corner.
  3. Setup: Give your app a name, description, and logo to create a branded experience.
  4. Content & Audience: Select which reports and dashboards from the workspace you want to include in the app.
  5. Define permissions: In the "Permissions" tab you can search for and select the individuals, M365 Groups, or security groups who should have access.
  6. Publish the App: Once configured, click "Publish app." Viewers can then find and install your app from the "Apps" menu item in the navigation page of the Power BI service with a direct link.

Embedding in SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams

Often, the best way to get people to use a report is to bring it to where they already work. Power BI integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft 365 products, making this incredibly easy.

Embedding in SharePoint Online

If your team uses SharePoint for its intranet or team sites, you can embed a live, fully interactive Power BI report directly onto a SharePoint page. There's a dedicated Power BI web part for this exact purpose. Simply add the web part to your page and paste in the URL of the report from the Power BI service. Users with the right permissions will see the full report without ever leaving SharePoint.

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Sharing in Microsoft Teams

For teams that live in Microsoft Teams, you can add a report as a dedicated tab within a channel. Click the "+" icon to add a new tab, search for the Power BI app, and then select the report you want to display. This puts key data right alongside your team's conversations and files, making it a natural part of the daily workflow and encouraging data-driven discussions.

Publishing Reports for Public Audiences

Sometimes you need to share your data with the world, not just your internal team. For these situations, Power BI provides a specific "Publish to web" feature.

Using "Publish to web (public)"

This feature generates a public link and an HTML embed code for your report. You can use this code to embed your live, interactive report on a public website, blog post, or social media. This is a powerful tool for data journalists, non-profits, or government agencies wanting to share open data.

A Critical Warning: When you use "Publish to web," the report and its data become genuinely public. Anyone on the internet with the link can view it, and search engines may even index it. There is no security or authentication. You should never use this feature for proprietary or sensitive data.

How to Publish to Web:

  1. In the Power BI Service, open the report you want to make public.
  2. Go to File > Embed report > Publish to web (public).
  3. A dialog box will appear with a stern warning about making your data public. Read it carefully.
  4. If you are sure, click "Create embed code" and then "Publish."
  5. Power BI will provide you with an HTML snippet to copy and paste into your website's code and a link which you can share with people directly.

Advanced and On-Premises Publishing Options

For large enterprises with specific data residency requirements or developers building custom applications, Power BI offers more advanced solutions.

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Power BI Report Server (On-Premises)

For organizations that cannot use a cloud service due to strict regulatory or data sovereignty policies, Power BI Report Server provides an on-premises alternative. You host and manage the server within your own data center. You build reports using a specific version of Power BI Desktop optimized for Report Server and publish them to a local web portal. It provides basic report sharing and management capabilities but lacks many of the advanced features and collaboration tools of the cloud-based Power BI Service.

Power BI Embedded (For a Custom App Experience)

This is a different beast altogether. Power BI Embedded is an Azure service designed for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and developers who want to embed Power BI analytics into their own applications for their customers. With this model, your application's end-users don't need their own Power BI licenses. Your application authenticates them, and you use an "app owns data" model to display the reports. It’s a powerful way to add world-class analytics to a commercial product without building it from scratch.

Final Thoughts

Choosing where to publish your Power BI reports is critical. From publishing to the Power BI Service for secure internal collaboration to embedding reports on public websites, the right choice depends entirely on who your audience is and the sensitivity of your data. Starting with the Power BI Service unlocks a suite of sharing options that can meet nearly any internal business need.

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