Forum Discussion
Publishing Reports Permission Errors
Hi,
I am looking to publish Power BI reports to send to clients. I have two issues doing this:
1) Power BI won't let me share reports with users outside of my organisation (do I need admin privilege for this?)
2) Even when I send a report to someone inside my organisation, when they click to open the report, they get a Permission required error that they don't have permissions to the underlying dataset. How can I grant them access to this, and would the process be different for allowing clients outside of my organisation access to the dataset?
Thanks!
Hii GregPring
You do not need to be a Power BI admin, but your tenant admin must enable external guest sharing. Invite the client as a Microsoft Entra B2B guest, then share the report using Specific people. The recipient also needs the appropriate Power BI licence unless both the report and semantic model are hosted on supported Premium/Fabric capacity.
For the internal permission error, open the workspace containing the semantic model, select Semantic model > More options > Manage permissions > Add user, and grant Read access. Grant Build only if they need to create their own reports. If the report uses models from other workspaces, grant access to each underlying model as well.
Two separate things here.
- External sharing is a tenant setting, not your own permissions. Your Power BI admin has to switch on external/B2B sharing before you can share outside the org. Heads up that the standard route also means the client is invited as a guest in your tenant and needs a Pro license (unless you're on F64/Premium), so it's more than a toggle.
- The "permission required" error is separate. Sharing a report doesn't grant access to the semantic model under it, so the recipient also needs Build permission on the dataset. Cleanest fix is to publish an App and add them to the audience, which bundles report and dataset access together. Same applies to external clients, on top of the guest invite and license.
Since your real goal is sending reports to clients: the guest, per-client license and permission juggling is a lot of friction. An embedded, app-owns-data setup avoids all of it. Clients aren't Power BI users, so no guests in your tenant, no license each, and no permission prompts, a service principal handles access. You could use a tool like DataTako, but for external client delivery it's a much cleaner model than sharing from the service...
Did this clear it up? A Kudo or Mark as Solution helps the next person who hits the same wall find it.
6 Replies
Hii GregPring
You do not need to be a Power BI admin, but your tenant admin must enable external guest sharing. Invite the client as a Microsoft Entra B2B guest, then share the report using Specific people. The recipient also needs the appropriate Power BI licence unless both the report and semantic model are hosted on supported Premium/Fabric capacity.
For the internal permission error, open the workspace containing the semantic model, select Semantic model > More options > Manage permissions > Add user, and grant Read access. Grant Build only if they need to create their own reports. If the report uses models from other workspaces, grant access to each underlying model as well.
Hi GregPring
The easiest way to do what you're looking to do is to buy a fabric capacity, because then I'll allow you to send reports to any users that you want to send through, as well as then allowing guest users to get access to that report. Where once you create the reports and share it with them, you'll also then be able to add them to view the semantic model.
Two separate things here.
- External sharing is a tenant setting, not your own permissions. Your Power BI admin has to switch on external/B2B sharing before you can share outside the org. Heads up that the standard route also means the client is invited as a guest in your tenant and needs a Pro license (unless you're on F64/Premium), so it's more than a toggle.
- The "permission required" error is separate. Sharing a report doesn't grant access to the semantic model under it, so the recipient also needs Build permission on the dataset. Cleanest fix is to publish an App and add them to the audience, which bundles report and dataset access together. Same applies to external clients, on top of the guest invite and license.
Since your real goal is sending reports to clients: the guest, per-client license and permission juggling is a lot of friction. An embedded, app-owns-data setup avoids all of it. Clients aren't Power BI users, so no guests in your tenant, no license each, and no permission prompts, a service principal handles access. You could use a tool like DataTako, but for external client delivery it's a much cleaner model than sharing from the service...
Did this clear it up? A Kudo or Mark as Solution helps the next person who hits the same wall find it.
External sharing works only if AAD B2B guest access is allowed and the Power BI admin has enabled external sharing in the tenant settings. The permission required message disappears once the viewer has Build permission on the dataset (Workspace → Dataset → Manage permissions → Add → Build).
External clients follow the same rule so they also need Build on the dataset, plus the tenant must allow B2B sharing.Hi GregPring,
I wanted to check if you had the opportunity to review the information provided. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.
Thank you.Hi GregPring,
May I check if this issue has been resolved? If not, Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.
Thank you
