Now that the report has been published, the next step is to share your work with other users within the organization.
Sharing is a Power BI Pro license feature. This means that all of the users that can view a shared report must have a Power BI Pro license to view a shared report, that is, unless the organization is using Power BI Premium. With Power BI Premium, reports that are published to a Premium workspace only require the report publisher to have a Power BI Pro license. Individuals with whom a report is shared only need a Power BI Free license to view reports that are published to a Premium workspace.
Make sure that you are viewing the report in the Service. Note that a visual element analogous to the ribbon in Power BI Desktop exists in the Service when viewing a report. This ribbon provides access to common features and operations within the Service that are specific to reports.
To share the report with others, perform the following steps:
- In the ribbon, click the Share link at the far right:
Figure 9 – The Ribbon and Share link in the Service
- The Share report dialog will be displayed, like so:
Figure 10 – The Share report dialog in the Service
- In the Grant access to field, Enter email addresses with which you wish to share the report. These email addresses can be internal to the Power BI/Office 365 tenant or external email addresses such as @gmail.com and @outlook.com addresses. These can also be email addresses of groups within Azure AD. If the email addresses are external, a warning message will be displayed, noting that the report is being shared with users external to the organization. Note that if you're sharing with email addresses external to the tenant, those users will need to have an Office 365/Azure AD logon, as well as a Power BI Pro license, in order to view the report. Finally, Azure AD groups can also be assigned, as well as individual email addresses.
- Optionally, use the Include an optional message field to include a personalized message alongside the notification users receive when sharing the report.
- Optionally, adjust the checkboxes for the dialog. These checkboxes include the following:
- Allow recipients to share your report: By default, users with who you share the report can, in turn, share the report with others. To prevent this, uncheck this box.
- Allow users to build new content using the underlying datasets: By default, users can use the underlying dataset for the report to build new reports. Unchecking this box removes this ability.
- Send email notification to recipients: By default, an email is sent to users who the report has been shared with. The email that these users receive will look similar to the following screenshot. If you decide to uncheck this box, then the users will not receive an email. However, you can always use the Report link at the bottom of the Share report dialog to send emails to users within the current tenant:
Figure 11 – Sharing a notification email
- Share report with current filters and slicers: This checkbox only appears if the filters and slicers have been adjusted after publishing the report. The default is to share the report with the originally published filters and slicer settings. If you wish to share the report with the current filter and slicer settings, check this box.
Once a report has been shared with a user, that report will now appear when they select the Shared with me link in the Navigation pane, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 12 – Shared with me interface