By: Andy Kim

Business Intelligence Consultant at Key2 Consulting

 
 

If you haven’t read last week’s part 1 of this blog, you can find it here: Baby Steps: How to Create Basic Charts in Power BI Desktop

Great, you’ve created a report in PowerBI Desktop. Now let’s talk about how you can share it with your co-workers, because after all, sharing is caring.

In this tutorial, I would like to walk you through the steps for sharing your reports via the PowerBI cloud platform. To start, sharing your PowerBI report can be accomplished in several ways:

1) Sharing via the PowerBI cloud platform (the one I’m showing you today)

2) Publish it to the web by embedding it into a webpage.

3) Embedding it into Sharepoint.

4) Exporting to a Powerpoint presentation.

5)  Save the report file and share it (which comes in the form of a *.pbix file).

 
How To Share Your Power BI Reports
 

High-Level Overview of Steps

– From PowerBI Desktop, publish the report to the PowerBI cloud platform.

– Create a dashboard on PowerBI cloud platform.

– Add your report(s) to the dashboard.

– Share your dashboard.

 

Detailed Steps

1. Go to PowerBI.com to get started with the PowerBI cloud platform.

2. Create an account or sign in if you already have an account.

 
Sign up Microsoft Power BI
 

3. From the PowerBI Desktop application where you created your report, open the report and click the “Publish” button.

 
Microsoft Power BI Desktop Application
 

4. Enter in the email address and password credentials that you created in the Power BI cloud application and click Sign in.

 
Power BI Desktop
 
Power BI Desktop Sign In
 

5. Select a destination to publish your report. This corresponds to the workspaces in the cloud platform.

 
Publish Microsoft Power BI Report
 

Example workspaces in the PowerBI cloud platform are shown below.

 
Microsoft Power BI Desktop Cloud Platform
 

5a)  Once you select a destination workspace, publishing will begin.

 
Publish Microsoft Power BI Report
 

5b)  You will see this when it is successfully published. Click the “Got it” button.

 
Publish Microsoft Power BI Desktop
 

5c)  You should now see your report and the associated dataset(s) published to the cloud.

 
Microsoft Power BI Desktop datasets
 

6. Click the ‘+’ button next to Dashboards to create a new dashboard.

 
Power BI Desktop dashboard
 

6a)  Type in a name for the new dashboard and press the Enter button to create the new dashboard.

 
Microsoft Power BI Desktop application
 

7. Now that the dashboard has been created, it’s time to add report(s) to it.

8. Click on your report to open it up.

 
Microsoft Power BI Desktop Report
 

9. Click on the “Pin Live Page” button at the top of the report.

 
Pin Live Page Microsoft Power BI Desktop
 

10. Select which dashboard you would like to add the report to, then click “Pin live”.

 
Microsoft Power BI Desktop dashboard
 

11. Your report has been added to your dashboard. Click on your dashboard to review it.

 
Atlanta Falcons Microsoft Power BI Desktop
 

12. Click on the ellipses that appears when you hover to the right of the dashboard name. Click on the Share button. Alternatively, you can click the Share button at the top right side of the dashboard.

 
Atlanta Falcons Microsoft Power BI Desktop report
 

13. Type in the email address(es) for whomever you want to share it with. It is important to note that the people you share it with must have a PowerBI cloud account as well. You can optionally type in a message. Note that there are 2 checkboxes at the bottom where you can select whether the recipients can share the dashboard, and whether they receive an email notification.

 
How To Share Your Power BI Reports
 

14. Fill in the fields as appropriate. In this case, I am sharing the dashboard with myself. Click the “Share” button.

 
Share Microsoft Power BI dashboard
 

15. After you have successfully shared your dashboard, you will see this notification.

 
Atlanta Falcons Microsoft Power BI dashboard
 

16. Here is the resulting email your recipients would receive.

 
Notification email from sharing a Microsoft Power BI Desktop report
 

17. When your recipient(s) click the hyperlink, it takes them to the PowerBI sign on page. Once they sign in, they will see a notification as illustrated below. From there, they can click the “Go to dashboard” link to see the dashboard you shared.

 
Microsoft Power BI sign in page
 

Now that we have walked step by step through publishing and sharing your reports, I would encourage you to go try it. It’s free (up to a certain memory limit, but even after that it is cheap) and it’s easy to use.

If you have any questions or experiences you want to share regarding Power BI, leave a comment below! We’d love to hear from you.