Module 13 · Power BI Fundamentals
Publishing reports
Publish to the Power BI Service, share safely, keep data fresh with scheduled refresh, and show your work in a portfolio.
About 30 minutes
The problem
The report works on your laptop. Now the managing director, the regional managers and the sales reps need it, with fresh numbers every morning, without anyone emailing .pbix files. And some of them should only see their own region.
The concept
Publishing. In Desktop, Home → Publish uploads the report and its data (the semantic model, formerly called a dataset) to a workspace in the Power BI Service (app.powerbi.com). You need to sign in with a work or school account.
Workspaces and licences
| What you can do | |
|---|---|
| Free licence | Publish to My workspace and view your own content. You can't share with others |
| Pro licence (paid, per user) | Create shared workspaces, share reports, and view content others share with you. Both the sharer and the viewer need Pro |
| Premium Per User / Premium or Fabric capacity | Larger models, more refreshes; with a large enough capacity, free users can view shared content |
Check your organisation's licences before promising a rollout.
Ways to share
- Workspace access: colleagues who build and maintain reports.
- Share a single report with named people.
- Apps: package a workspace's reports into a tidy app for a wider audience (the recommended way to distribute).
- Export: PDF or PowerPoint snapshots (File → Export) for board packs.
- Publish to web: creates a public link anyone on the internet can open, with no sign-in. Never use it for company data; your admin may have switched it off, and that's a good thing.
Keeping data fresh: scheduled refresh. In the Service, the semantic model's settings let you schedule refreshes (up to 8 a day on Pro). Data from files on your own computer or company servers needs an on-premises data gateway; cloud sources such as SharePoint or OneDrive files usually don't.
Row-level security (RLS). In Desktop, Modeling → Manage roles lets you define rules such as [region] = "Lagos". Assign people to roles in the Service, and each sees only their rows. This is how one report serves every regional manager.
Example
Kolanut's rollout plan:
- Move the CSVs to a SharePoint folder so refresh works without a gateway.
- Publish to a workspace called Sales Analytics (analysts have access).
- Add RLS roles for each region; map regional managers to their role.
- Schedule refresh daily at 6:00.
- Publish an app called Kolanut Sales for managers and reps.
- Export page 1 to PDF for the monthly board pack.
Walkthrough
If you have a work or school account:
- Home → Publish → choose My workspace.
- Open app.powerbi.com, find the report, and explore it in the browser.
- Open the semantic model's settings and look at the Scheduled refresh options (it will explain that local CSVs need a gateway).
For your portfolio (no work account needed):
- Save the
.pbix. It contains everything, so reviewers can open it in Desktop. - Take clean screenshots of each page (File → Export → Export to PDF also works offline).
- Write a one-page README: the business question, the data, the model (screenshot of Model view), the key measures, and the findings.
- Put the
.pbix, PDF and README in a GitHub repository or a shared drive folder.
Practice
Practice
Which sharing option creates a public link that anyone on the internet can open, and must never be used for company data? (Three words.)
Practice
Which Power BI feature makes each regional manager see only their own region's rows in the same report? (Give the three-word name.)
Check your understanding
Answer every question to check.