Microsoft’s Power BI is a business analytics tool and service that is popular with Ideate Software customers. In our post last week, we demonstrated one example of connecting user-data from Ideate BIMLink. Once you’ve built a report or dashboard, you’ll probably want to share it with co-workers or with others external to your organization.
Your collaboration and sharing experience will be different based on the level of Power BI account you and your recipient each have. To distill the extensive and sometimes contradictory information found online, we offer the following table of options available for Power BI content. The table generally moves from the most cost and control at the top to the least cost, interactivity, and control at the bottom.
These are the different account levels considered in the table. Every step up in account level allows the affordances of the levels beneath it:
- No Power BI Account
- Power BI Free Account
- Power BI Pro Account with no purchase of capacity, meaning Shared Capacity is used
- Power BI Pro Account with organizational purchase of Premium Capacity
- Power BI Pro Account with organizational purchase of Power BI Embedded from Azure
Note: App Workspaces are in the process of being updated, and the sharing options will be affected. The new App Workspaces are in preview mode and currently allow assigning member roles: Admin, Member, and Contributor. A read-only Viewer role is also in the works. Note that you can have finer control over who can see what data by using Row-level security.
Learn more here:
- How should I collaborate and share in Power BI?
- Share your Power BI dashboards and reports with coworkers and others
- Create the new workspaces (preview) in Power BI
- Publish apps with dashboards and reports in Power BI
- Power BI Premium – what is it?
- Power BI Free vs Pro
About the Author
Stephanie Fitzgerald – Software Developer
Stephanie earned her Ed.M. in Technology, Innovation, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from University of Oregon. She also gained a certificate in Advanced Full-Stack JavaScript from Alchemy Code Lab in Portland, OR. In past roles, Stephanie wrote C# and web design curriculum for Zaniac, where she was also the project manager for development, managed a research study of student motivation to learn math for Harvard University, and redesigned the website for a Tufts University library. As a student, she built a social network site for athletes, a back-end security package, and a tablet game app for the California Science Center.