Sharing a Power BI report within Teams - Data Ideology

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    Sharing a Power BI report within Teams

    Sharing a Power BI report within Teams

    Do your business users have trouble finding reports and navigating through the Power BI Service? If your organization uses Microsoft Teams, you can embed a report directly in a channel for greater visibility.

    The Power BI Service is the default central location where end users can view and interact with Power BI reports. As your organization’s Power BI report footprint grows, you’ll want to slowly develop a habit of having your business users access this site on a daily basis for all of their reporting needs. But for an organization in the early stages of their Power BI journey, your first steps are to garner interest in viewing reports, regardless of where they are stored.

    Novice users of the Power BI Service can sometimes find it to be overwhelming and confusing. There are several different sections within the site where a user could potentially locate a report – within an App, within a Workspace, Shared With Me section, etc. While all of these locations have their own specific purpose, an average user might not know why they should be searching through a given section.

    If your intent is to simply get a report in users’ hands with minimal frustration, embedding it directly in a commonly utilized service like Microsoft Teams could be the answer. This obviously assumes that your organization is using Teams – but we’re finding that companies using Power BI often use Teams as a part of their Office 365 bundle. Teams is a great collaborative tool and acts as a centralized platform, so if users are in the rhythm of using it daily, why not share a report there as well?

    Sounds great – How can I set this up?

    Before you get started, there are a few prerequisites that need to be in place – essentially ensuring the correct Power BI licensing along with permissions to access/view the report:

    • Your users have a Power BI Pro license, or the report is contained in a Power BI Premium capacity (EM or P SKU) with a Power BI license.
    • Users have signed in to the Power BI service to activate their Power BI license to consume the report.
    • To add a report in Microsoft Teams with the Power BI tab, you must have at least a Viewer role in the workspace that hosts the report.
    • To see the report in the Power BI tab in Microsoft Teams, users must have permission to view the report.
    • Users must be Microsoft Teams users with access to channels and chats.

    If you have not already published your report to the Power BI Service, that’s step 1. Once published, shift over to Teams and locate the appropriate team/channel that you’d like to house the report. From the tabbed options at the top of your screen, click on the plus sign (+) to pop up a new window where you can add a new Power BI widget:

    After selecting the Power BI icon, a window will appear with all of the Workspaces that you belong to. From the list, choose the report that you would like to share. (Note: you will need to ensure that everyone within this Teams channel also has viewer access to this report in the service, per the prerequisites above). If you’d like to let your channel know about this new report, check the box in the bottom left corner. Press Save when finished.

    You should now be able to view this report as a new tab within the channel:

    There you have it! In just a few clicks, you have delivered your Power BI report directly to your Teams-centric users, without them even having to log into the Service.