My company has been using free office 365 accounts, so they can neither share nor see each others Power BI reports/dashboards/ whatever. How do I work around this without paying for pro account 'If' such a workaround is possible.
Sharing is a Pro feature. With Free accounts you can use only Publish to web (Public), which is very limited feature, makes the data publicly available (so it is definitely not suitable for your use case) and must be explicitly enabled by your tenant administrator, or to share .PBIX files internally with your collogues (by e-mail, network share, or something similar).
As a conclusion, your best option is to start paying for it. If your company has development skills, you can also embed these use app owns data scenario, which is normally used to share Power BI elements with your customers outside of your organization, to share the reports with your co-workers.
To share without Pro licenses you can’t share using the Power BI service. But you’re free to share your .pbix files with your colleagues using a file share, SharePoint, OneDrive, etc. They will need Power BI Desktop to open the files.
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we are running Power BI on Premium Capacity, I have been trying to share my reports and dashboards with people outside the organization, with no luck. I need some solid instructions on how to share content with external users, with people outside the organization. There is nothing online that makes sense. Some articles say, as long as you have Premium you can just share with anyone. Testing this usually does not work too well. Other articles say I have to add them to my Azure AD, then share, but you need Premium. I thought the benefit of Premium is that you can share, with users that are external. We do many dashboards that need to be shared externally, Power BI is difficult to take seriously if it will not allow this functionality. Please help!
With Power BI Premium, yes you can share with anyone, it is focused on sharing with users in your own organisation/tenancy, as with Premium, you can allocate those users with Power BI Free licenses, so they act as 'Read Only' users. It saves the expense of allocating a Power BI Pro License to consume reports. For users external to your O365 tenancy, you can still share in a few ways.
Create a user for them in your active directory so they have to log in with a '#yourdomain.com' email address. They are allocated a Power BI Free license and can be allocated to the relevant workspace or app.
Add the external user as an guest to your domain. This way they can log into using their '#theirdomain.com' email address
With option 2 the guest user will have to use your tenancy id in the url, they can't just go to app.powerbi.com as they will be logging into their Power BI tenancy. It will be something like https://app.powerbi.com/home?ctid=1234f5f6-12f3-4567-8ab9-123a456bc78d
. With the guest user, you can allocate them a Power BI Free, or if they have one allocated to them in their domain you don't have to. (You don't have to have Power BI Premium to use this option, you can allocate them a Pro license if you wanted to, or they can bring their own.)
There is a third option under the licensing term of Power BI Premium, is that you can used Premium as a backend to your own website that hosts Power BI reports (App owns data), like you can do with Power BI Embedded. You have to build you own website that surfaces and handles reports access, so they don't log into Power BI directly, just your website that sits in top of it.
I am a new user of power bi. I am currently using free account of power bi and used share to web feature to share my report publicly.
Using free account i want to share my report with multiple users while stopping my report consumers to re-share the report. If that is not possible using free account then is it possible to buy only one pro account and attain my objective defined above?
Buying multiple pro accounts for each individual is not possible as there would be many consumers of my report. Buying premium account is also not possible as it is too expensive.
The only way to share reports is from Pro User to Pro User, via Workspaces or direct sharing or App. In the sharing options for the report to the other users you can turn off the allow the recipients to share as well. Or you can allow workspace consumers to be read only.
Sharing using the 'Share to Web' function creates a publicly accessible URL, if anyone passes that URL to anyone else, they will be able to see it, and it is NOT secure, and you can't limit/restrict access.
For these use cases, the best solution is to embed the report in an (web) application. Start with Tutorial: Embed Power BI content into an application for your customers.
I have a dashboard I've built using Power BI, that contains sensitive information. I want to share this dashboard with external users outside of my organization, that do not and will not have PowerBI.
From everything I've read, it appears I have a few options:
The external recipient of the dashboard would need to download Power BI Pro (from my understanding, they won't be able to view my dashboard with anything other than Power BI Pro?)
I somehow embed my dashboard in a Sharepoint which the external recipients have access to - but from what I've read, this seems likely to fail since they don't have Power BI.
I publish dashboard to the web, and have no way to password protect or restrict access.
Are these my only options? Am I correct in that anyone I wish to share the dashboard with needs Power BI Pro to view, or I need to publish it to the open web and let it be publicly available?
If this is the case.. this is just one more reason I am disenchanted by Power BI.
There are other options in addition to these you mentioned already (i.e. directly sharing through adding users to the workspace, embed in SharePoint and Publish to web).
Sharing (except Publish to web, which is public) require both the publisher and the consumer to have Power BI Pro licenses (which is not the case for you). Purchasing Power BI Premium (P SKUs only) will allow you to share reports with non-Pro (i.e. Power BI free users), but they still needs Power BI licenses (although free). Also this will costs you thousands per month and has annual commitment, which means you can't buy this for a month or two.
If this doesn't work for you, you can also:
Export these reports to PDF or PowerPoint and share the files with them.
If the report imports the data (see Dataset modes in the Power BI service), you can send them the .pbix file directly. It can be opened in Power BI Desktop even without having no Power BI account at all.
Publish the report to local instance of Power BI Report Server, where you can control who can access the report. You need either Power BI Premium (P SKUs) or SQL Server Enterprise with software assurance for that.
Embed the report using Power BI's API into custom written application, implementing app owns data scenario (see Tutorial: Embed Power BI content into an application for your customers and for example this answer).
To add to Andrey's answer, depending on the number of users you can use Azure AD B2B so you can have guest users access your Power Bi Reports and allocated work-spaces. However it depends on the number.
For example if you need to add 100 users, and you pay for the Power BI Pro licenses then it would be cheaper to design a basic portal and use the Power BI Embedded option and build you own basic web portal to embedded the reports in (The app owns data scenario). The basic A SKU's start around the same price as about 73 Pro licenses, or £570 per month. There will be extra cost in development of the portal and the running costs on top of the Embedded price
If your external end user is going to pay for the Pro license, then Azure AD B2B could work for you.
Hope that helps
I want to share the power BI report to the people who are not pro licensed users in our organization. Is there any way to do it as i could only add the people who have pro license as of now. As I want to share the reports on weekly basis to the internal larger group in the organization, I couldn't make all of them get the pro license. I am not looking for PDF versions. Also, Is there a way to send this using custom mail box rather than from the Microsoft Power BI email (i.e. the email of the report should go from my email id rather than the default microsoft power bi email id).
There are a couple of options but I suspect none meet your needs.
1) Install Power BI Desktop on all user's PCs and have them manually open the file from a network share.
2) Make the report accessible to the public, then everyone can access it for free (and I mean everyone).
3) Power BI Premium allows access without a Pro licence but it's significantly more expensive and only makes economic sense if you're talking about needing over 600 users.
4) If you have an SQL Server Enterprise agreement and Software Assurance then you can install Power BI Report Server locally. It largely does the same things but is a bit behind the cloud version.
I would like to share a Power BI report with users within my organization. I have a Power BI Pro account. The other users don't have one. Is this possible?
The users I am sharing with cannot open the report. It says they need to be in a Pro account.
Sharing is Pro feature. This means that the publisher and every consumer needs Power BI Pro license (except for Power BI Premium, when only the publisher needs to be licensed).
You have these options to share the report with non-licensed users:
Buy Premium
Deploy the reports to Power BI Reporting Server on-premise or use other reporting engine (e.g. SSRS)
Send them the .pbix files directly (e.g. by e-mail)
Export the report to file (e.g. PowerPoint) and share it
Use Publish to web - keep in mind that this makes them public and anyone with this link can see them (also there are some limitations, e.g. you can't do this for reports with RLS)
Embed within your application using app owns data scenario (see: Embed Power BI content into an application for your customers)
And of course, buy Power BI Pro licenses for your colleagues :)
If you are Office 365, and have Teams and/or SharePoint, you can use Power BI Embedded, to inset the reports into Teams and SharePoint. Users will be able to access the reports with out a Pro license. Depending on the number of users that will consume the reports you may save so money.
https://jlsql.blog/2018/01/30/power-bi-embedded-sku-differences-and-cost-breakdowns/
this gives an idea of the cost to capacity. As the capacity is limited int CPU and Ram you may need to schedule any data fresh so you don't hit the memory limits