You can share a Power BI report by sending a direct link, publishing it as an organizational app, granting workspace access, or embedding it in platforms like SharePoint. The right method depends on your audience size, whether recipients are inside or outside your organization, and what license everyone holds.
Share a Report With a Direct Link
The fastest way to share a single report is the built-in Share button in the Power BI service. Open the report (or find it in your report list), select Share, and you’ll see a “Send link” dialog with three audience options: people in your organization, specific people you name, or people who already have access. Type in email addresses or names, add an optional message, and send.
When you share this way, you can toggle two permissions on or off for each recipient. The first, “Reshare,” lets them forward the report to others. The second, “Build,” lets them create their own reports using the underlying data. If you just want someone to view the report and nothing more, leave both unchecked.
Direct sharing works well for a handful of people. For dozens or hundreds of recipients, an organizational app is a better fit.
Publish an Organizational App
An organizational app bundles dashboards and reports into a single package you distribute to a large team or your entire company. Recipients get a clean, read-only experience (unless you specifically grant build permissions), and they also get read access to the semantic model, which is the structured data layer behind the report.
This method is ideal when you want consistent, polished content that a broad audience can find in one place without navigating workspace folders. You publish the app from within a workspace, choose the audience (a security group, a distribution list, or the whole org), and recipients install it from the Power BI Apps section. Updates you make to the workspace content flow through to the app when you republish.
Grant Workspace Access for Collaboration
If your goal is co-authoring rather than read-only distribution, add people directly to the workspace where the report lives. Workspaces support four roles, each with different capabilities:
- Admin: Full control, including managing membership and deleting the workspace.
- Member: Can publish, edit, and delete content, and share reports.
- Contributor: Can create and edit content but cannot share it or manage access.
- Viewer: Can only view content, with no editing or sharing rights.
Everyone in the workspace can see all the data in it by default. If you need to limit what certain people see, assign them the Viewer role and set up Row-Level Security (covered below).
Embed a Report in SharePoint Online
You can drop a live, interactive Power BI report directly into a SharePoint page so people see it without leaving SharePoint. The steps are straightforward:
- Open the report in the Power BI service.
- Go to File, then Embed report, then SharePoint Online.
- Copy the report URL from the dialog.
- In SharePoint, edit the target page (or create a new modern site page).
- Add a new web part, choose Power BI from the Data analysis section, and paste in the report URL.
- Publish the SharePoint page.
One important detail: embedding the report on a SharePoint page does not automatically give viewers permission to see it. Each user needs access to both the SharePoint page and the report in Power BI. If someone can reach the SharePoint page but hasn’t been granted report access, they’ll see an error instead of data. You still need to share or grant workspace access in Power BI separately.
The web part also has display settings you can customize, including whether the filter pane and page navigation pane are visible, and how the report fits within the page layout.
Share With People Outside Your Organization
Sharing externally uses Microsoft Entra B2B (formerly Azure AD B2B) to bring outside users in as guests. Before you can invite anyone, your Power BI admin needs to enable “Invite external users to your organization” in the Power BI admin portal, and the person sending the invitation must hold the Guest Inviter role in Microsoft Entra ID. Pro trial licenses are not sufficient for inviting guest users; you need a full Pro or Premium Per User license.
There are two ways to invite external guests. The planned approach goes through the Azure portal: navigate to Microsoft Entra ID, select Users, then New guest user, and enter their email address. They’ll receive an email with a “Get Started” button to accept. The quicker, ad hoc approach is to simply type an external email address into the Share dialog on any report or add it through an app’s access page. Power BI sends the invitation automatically, and the guest signs in with their organization email to accept.
Guest users still need proper licensing to view content. You can handle this by hosting the shared content in Premium capacity (which lets guests with any license type view it), assigning the guest a Pro or PPU license from your organization, or relying on a Pro or PPU license the guest already holds in their own organization.
Licensing Rules for Sharing
Licensing is the part of sharing that trips people up most often. Here is how it breaks down by license type.
Users with a free Power BI license can build reports for themselves, but they cannot share content or collaborate with others. The one exception: if the content lives in a workspace hosted on Premium capacity (or Fabric F64 or greater), free users can view reports that Pro or PPU users share with them.
A Pro license lets you share and collaborate with other Pro users. If your organization also has Premium capacity, Pro users can share content stored in Premium workspaces with anyone, including free users.
Premium Per User (PPU) is more restrictive than you might expect. In a PPU workspace, every user needs a PPU license to collaborate and view content. The exception, again, is Premium capacity: content saved there can be shared with Pro and free users.
In practical terms, if your recipients have free licenses, your best path is to store the report in a Premium capacity workspace and share from there. Otherwise, everyone involved needs at least a Pro license.
Control Who Sees What With Row-Level Security
When you share a report broadly but different people should see different slices of the data, Row-Level Security (RLS) lets you filter rows based on who is viewing. A sales manager might see only their region’s numbers, while a VP sees all regions, even though they open the same report.
You set up RLS in Power BI Desktop. Open the Modeling tab, select Manage Roles, and create a new role. Give it a name, pick the table you want to filter, and write a filter expression. The default editor works for simple conditions (like filtering a Region column), and you can switch to a DAX editor for more complex logic. Save the role when you’re done.
After publishing the report to the Power BI service, open the semantic model’s security settings. Select the role you created and add members by typing email addresses or security group names. Each member added to that role will only see data rows where the filter expression returns true.
To verify everything works before rolling it out, use the “Test as role” option in the service. Select the role, and the report reloads showing only the data that role is allowed to see. You can also test as a specific person to confirm their experience matches your intent.