Power BI to users without Power BI

11,033

Solution 1

Right here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-how-to-collaborate-distribute-dashboards-reports

it says

You need a Power BI Pro license to share your content, and those you share it with do too, or the content needs to be in a workspace in a Premium capacity.

But you can always just share the .pbix file locally. This doesn't use PowerBI.Com at all so you can do what you want. You should just be aware that you won't get a lot of the features like security etc.

That's the licencing terms of using Power BI. No way around it. Anything that works around this violates licencing.

Going by your other question.... you don't even need Power BI - you just want a bunch of static PDF's split by department! There are many ways to build a low cost reporting solution that spawns out PDF's, for example SSRS.

Everyone thinks Power BI is perfect for everything. It's not!! Think outside the square!

Solution 2

Well you can use embed feature of powerbi. Powerbi offers api to get reports and dashboards from your account. You can call the api to get reports and dashboards,embed them in your own application and even store the report id and dashboard id in your database. Then share those reports and dashboards among your users via your own application.

Solution 3

If your users has Office 365 accounts, you can enable their free Power BI accounts, so they aren't "without Power BI" exactly. Sharing reports is Power BI Pro feature, though (i.e. it is paid).

I see couple of options you have.

1) The poor's man solution is to prepare 100's of one page reports (one for each user) with your Pro account and subscribe yourself to those reports. Then create rules in your Office 365 account to forward these e-mails to the appropriate user. You can look at the subject of these e-mails to get the name of the report. This will be a bit cumbersome to manage, but it is almost for free. The problem here is the "one page" part. In the e-mail you will get a screenshot of the first report section only and a link to the actual report (for which your colleagues will need Pro accounts).

2) You can write an application implementing "app own data" scenario. This means that you will use your Pro account as "master account" to access the reports, but you will authenticate your users (and decide which reports they can see) in another way. This can be a web or a desktop application. Choose what is more appropriate for you.

Solution 4

Well you can create the embed code in Microsoft Power BI service and can distribute this link to different users. But there is one exception, if you have implemented row level security in your reports it will not be shown in the embed code. If you want to show the reports with the row level security you need to use the Power BI embedding process. In this process you create your own dashboard in any language and then embed the reports from Power BI service into your own dashboard and in the dashboard users can see their reports. You can visit this link

https://www.loginworks.com/blogs/how-to-embed-power-bi-reports-into-your-application-using-power-bi-rest-apis/

Solution 5

Our company uses the Power BI Report Server. If your company already has a SQL Server Enterprise license or above, then you already have it, no additional costs. Works great, you can create SSRS and Power BI reports, deploy to your server.

Share:
11,033
Phil Collins
Author by

Phil Collins

Updated on June 12, 2022

Comments

  • Phil Collins
    Phil Collins almost 2 years

    So I've asked a similar question, but I thought I'd ask it more generally to get as many ideas as possible.

    I have Power BI Pro. I am tasked with creating reports for hundreds of recipients, each one personalized to that specific user.

    My organization will not pay out for everyone else to have Power BI enabled, although everyone will have an O365 account.

    How do I share my reports created in Power BI to users without Power BI? Factoring in there are several hundred of them to produce every week by a team of 2 people.

    Thanks in advance!