Power BI is an incredibly effective business intelligence tool that bridges the gap between data and decision-making. One of its key features, however, is the ability to work in real time. To do this, you must first learn how to publish Power BI reports and dashboards with your teams - and potentially the public.

Publishing reports will open the door to real-time collaborations where data analysis, insight sharing, and idea generation become very effective. In this step-by-step guide, we’ll look at how to make a Power BI report public for your team members and how to make the most of the powerful Microsoft software.

Before learning how to publish Power BI reports, it should be noted that changes made to the published report won’t be reflected in the original Power BI Desktop file. So, you can use this process to share a Power BI report with other users without any risk of losing the original data and visualizations.

Publishing Power BI reports is relatively easy, although you will naturally need to be online at the time of doing this or completing subsequent real-time collaborative work. Once you are, learning how to publish a report in Power BI is quite easy and can be completed through the following steps;

Following this, the Power BI report will be published to your Power BI site. This will only take a few seconds. Once completed, the pop-up wizard will confirm this and provide an html link that can take you to the published report. This will be presented as “[name of report].pbix.

This link can then be sent to other team members. However, you should not panic if you do not make note of the address as you can find this from inside your Power BI report at any time by clicking the ‘Share’ button. This will subsequently give you the sharing link and provide the option to share it directly with colleagues via Outlook, PowerPoint, or Teams.

While a Power BI report is a comprehensive dataset view that delivers detailed analysis and meaningful insights, Power BI dashboards are offer a one-page summary that is focused heavily on visual representation. So, while the two terms are often interchanged by users, they are different items that have contrasting functions.

Like reports, dashboards can be shared. As such, knowing how to publish a dashboard in Power BI opens the door to new capabilities, not least in facilitating quick data-driven decisions.

The process of publishing Power BI dashboards is relatively simple too. Firstly, you will need to create the dashboard by completing these steps;

The complete dashboard should now show under the ‘Dashboards’ section of ‘My Workspace’. A dashboard can be published through the same method as the report, creating a shareable link for colleagues to access the dashboard.

Alternatively, you could share a Content Pack. This includes the dashboard, report, and dataset. From the Power BI workspace, click the ‘Settings’ icon (depicted as a gear) and click ‘Create Content Pack’. The pop-up box will allow you to decide whether to send the content to ‘Specific Groups’ or ‘My Entire Organization’.

When scrolling down, you will also notice that the ‘Select Items To Publish’ area allows you to individually select which dashboards, reports, and datasets should be included. This provides the most convenient way to publish a dashboard internally with as much or as little additional data as required.

If you ever need to edit the Content Pack, such as adding new items, you can do this by clicking the ‘Settings’ icon and clicking ‘View Content Pack’ instead of ‘Create Content Pack’. Any changes will be made almost instantaneously.

When publishing Power BI reports for collaborative work, you will be online. However, you can also use a powerful publish to web feature that lets you embed interactive content (such as data visuals) to websites, blog posts, social media, and emails. It is a feature that’s available on all editable reports from My Workspace.

Publishing publicly to the web is different from publishing Power BI Reports using the above methods because the content is designed to be accessed by external audiences rather than exclusive to internal connections. When looking at how to publish Power BI reports to web, then, it’s good to know that viewers do not have to be signed up to the software to view the reports.

While you are essentially creating a connection between your Power BI report (or at least specific visuals) and the target website/online platform, the process is still very simple;

This pop-up window also provides the email link to your published Power BI report as well as the HTML embed code that can be added to your website or target channel. Either of these can be copied with a single click before being pasted in the appropriate location.

Knowing how to publish a Power BI report to web will allow you to provide readers, customers, and relevant parties access to responsive visualized data that automatically updates when you change the data within the Microsoft software.

Before you can get started, though, a Microsoft Power BI license to publish to web from My Workspace will be required. When looking to publish Power BI reports to web from workspaces, you’ll need a Microsoft Power BI Pro or Premium Per User license instead.

Microsoft Power BI isn’t only designed to help you share reports and visual data with colleagues. It also allows them to share their reports with you. So, as well as knowing how to publish the dashboard to the private site in Power BI, you must learn how to access Power BI reports that others have published for your benefit.

Firstly, the person who created the report needs to know where to publish Power BI reports and consider how that affects you. If the content is published to a website or social media through the ‘publish to web’ process, you can access it in the same way that any other user would - by visiting the web page where it has been published.

For private published Power BI reports that are designed for internal communications, you can access the data via an email link sent by the creator or directly from inside your Power BI account. Once signed into your account, you can access published reports that have been shared with you via the following steps;

Once you have opened the right page, you can then use the various filters from the ‘Filters’ tab on the right sidebar to see the data you need. When you hover over the visual, you’ll be able to view any permissible actions by clicking the ‘Filters And Slicers’ icon (upside down pyramid).

The ‘View’ icon will allow you to see the content as ‘Full Screen’, ‘Fit To Page’, ‘Fit To Width’, or ‘Actual Size’ solutions.

Asking “Where does Power BI publish to?” is one of the most important parts of the entire process. While the software will guide you through the procedure and notify you about significant issues at each stage, you must pay close attention.

The deployment of Power BI reports and visual data will affect;

Generally speaking, you will only publish to web when you are happy for information to be seen by anyone. For example, you may want to show the demographic results of your market research.

However, when reports include sensitive information (such as personal information from a survey responder), you must only publish to private channels that are only accessible by authorized members of your team. Reports relating to the company’s financial performance are another scenario where deploying reports via the private site in Power BI is the only choice.

When you take the internal route, though, you must also check that recipients know how to view published reports in Power BI. Power BI Pro users can also deploy to an app workspace content and assign four types of roles (Viewer, Contributor, Member, and Admin) to relevant parties.

It should also be noted that data from other BI platforms can be deployed to Power BI. Deployment can be completed to a test environment or production environment.

The Microsoft Power BI publish to web feature is a particularly popular solution for content creators or businesses that wish to create engaging content or share data in a visual manner that audiences will understand with ease.

As such, a growing percentage of the five million plus Power BI subscribers now use this feature. However, it should be noted that it isn’t available for reports that colleagues have shared with you or any reports that have row-level security in place.

One of the great features of the publish to web tool is that you can also quickly edit, update, refresh, or stop sharing any previously published visuals with real-time results. From a visual perspective, you should pay attention to the following line: