Publish to web and licensing

[Aleksi]

Hi there,

Is there any licensing limitations if I want to publish a PowerBI report to public internet in theory for anyone in the world to see? Report would be updated once a month.

Also in PowerBI documentation it says publish to web does not support real-time data sources. I tried to publish a report with direct query and it seemed to work? I was able to create the public url and access the report. How is it not supported? Does the data on the report not update anymore after publishing or what?

[v-qiuyu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Aleksi,

Both Power BI free and pro users can use "Publish to web" feature, any consumer of the report (the readers, viewers) do not need to be Power BI users.

In my opinion, DirectQuery mode connect to data source is not real-time data source. Real-time data source should be like stream dataset, as we can't create a report use this kind of dataset, it's not supported to use "Publish to web".

Besides, regarding data refresh about publish to web report, it needs about 1 hour to reflect. See: Data refresh.

Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu

[Aleksi]

Thank you, this is exactly what I thought. I've been testing this "Publish to Web" feature with Direct Query to our local database and it seems to work really well. 

[Nk]

I am trying with Power BI Desktop ( free version) , and do not see "publish to web" feature ( I am only using Excell data at the moment). How do I enable this feauture ?