Oct 12, 2022
Demystifying Power BI — Sharing Options for End-users
A summary and overview of content sharing and exporting options in the Power BI ecosystem
Collaboration is a critical aspect of Power BI as an enterprise reporting platform. Power BI offers multiple sharing options to collaborate and make the best use of data and insights to make informed decisions.
This article will briefly discuss the sharing and exporting options available to Power BI users. We will also look at how the administrators can control the options for users.
This article is a part of the multipart series on the Power BI ecosystem and continues the concepts introduced in the introduction article and refers heavily to the Power BI back-end platforms. We recommend reading through both articles for a complete understanding.
Users have multiple options to share the Power BI content with colleagues. The vast range of sharing options ensures that every user finds the optimal method for them and their teams. However, most sharing options require the sharer and recipient to have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license unless the content is hosted in a Premium capacity.
Note: This article only covers the sharing and exporting options for reports and dashboards. To learn more about the visual level sharing and exporting features (enabled by visual headers), head over to the following article:
Sharing & Exporting in Power BI
Let's look at the available sharing and exporting options in the Power BI service.
Shareable Links: Sharing links allow users to share access to reports on an ad-hoc basis without granting access to the Power BI workspace hosting the report. Links also help simplify administrative efforts by allowing report owners to specify who should receive a link and what rights they have to the report (or dashboard) and underlying data. In addition, users can include their view of the report, e.g., filter selections, visual personalization, drill, etc., in the shareable link. Power BI admins can disable the shareable links or limit the feature to specific groups.
Email Subscription: Subscriptions are created in the Power BI Portal by users or for users to deliver emails at a scheduled frequency. Subscriptions work for reports, dashboards, and paginated reports. Users will receive an email on the set schedule with a snapshot and link to the report or dashboard. Power BI admins can disable the email subscription feature.
Chat in Teams: Chat in Teams allows users to open a Teams chat directly from the Power BI service. Power BI creates a link to the Power BI dashboards, reports, visuals, and datasets and lets users share it with any person, group, or channel on Microsoft Teams. Power BI admins can disable the Teams integration with Power BI or limit the feature to specific groups.
PowerPoint: Sharing with PowerPoint works in two ways, and Power BI admins can disable the PowerPoint export or limit the feature to specific groups.
- Embed an image: Embed an image works by exporting the Power BI report into a PowerPoint slide deck with one slide for each report page. The report is static; the slides retain the report's state at the export time as high-resolution images. Exporting eliminates the need to log on to Power BI to view the report, thus removing all Power BI permissions and data security.
- Embed live data: Another option is to embed a live version of a report page in PowerPoint. The recipient can interact with the data, as in the Power BI service. No data is exported from Power BI. The data respects all Power BI permissions and data security, including row-level security (RLS).
Print: Power BI service offers an in-built printing functionality to print a report page, an entire dashboard, a report visual, or a dashboard tile. This printing feature differs from the browser's print function and may not always provide the best print results. Moreover, if your report has more than one page, you'll need to print each page separately. Power BI admins can disable the print feature or limit the feature to specific groups.
PDF: Export the Power BI report as a PDF file with one page for each report page. Exporting to PDF is similar to embedding the report as an image in PowerPoint and has the same security implications. Power BI admins can disable the PDF export or limit the feature to specific groups.
QR Code: QR codes provide a flexible option to share the report with mobile users. Users can create a QR code for any report in the Power BI service. The Power BI mobile app supports QR codes with URL query parameters. In contrast, the QR code generated by the Power BI service does not support URL query parameters.
Exporting Paginated reports: Paginated reports can also be exported as MHTLM, Word, and XML documents. Power BI admins can disable the export features or limit the use of export to specific groups.
The following table summarizes the licensing requirements and the admin control for the discussed sharing options.
That's all for this article!
Conclusion
The Power BI landscape and sharing options are constantly evolving, and keeping track of all available options is challenging. So did we leave anything out?
This article examined Power BI's sharing and exporting options and how administrators control them. Can you determine how many sharing and export options your admin has disabled?
Other articles in this series
This article was a part of the article about client applications and interfaces in Power BI. We recommend reading through the following article to complete the knowledge.
In another article, we talked about the data management capabilities of Power BI. We will discuss the types of data models, storage modes, connectivity modes, data cleansing, and refresh options in Power BI.
We have another article about report types, report design, and data modeling tools in Power BI.
