Cant turn off Analyze in Excel

[Anonymous]

In a report, when selecting the option "Do not allow export of data", it will still be possible to use the option "Analyze in Excel" and get access to the underlying data. Is this a bug or intentionally done?

[v-danhe-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

As Seth_C_Bauer said, you could check below options in Admin portal in Power BI service:

Regards,

Daniel He

[Anonymous]

@v-danhe-msft

Disabling this option does disable all the exports, however this is not what one would want as you want to be able to select export setting on a report basis. In a PowerBI report there's an option to choose if users are able to export underlying + summarized, summarized only or nothing at all, however these options do nothing if the export function is enabled since the analyze in excel option is always available, even when it is turned off!

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@Anonymous Are you sharing reports, or granting access to the workspace to end users?

[Anonymous]

@Seth_C_Bauer

Publishing them as an App on a premium capacity.

[Anonymous]

Anyone? Seems like a pretty big problem, certainly from a security perspective.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@Anonymous Ok, couple things here. I'm a bit confused because we are talking about two different controls, and the behaviour you describe keeps jumping between the two features.

Specifically for Analyze in Excel I rechecked the documentation -> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-analyze-in-excel

There are a couple big callouts:

1) "Administrators for Power BI tenants can use the Power BI Admin Portal to disable the use of Analyze in Excel with on-premises datasets housed in Analysis Services (AS) databases. When that option is disabled, Analyze in Excel is disabled for AS databases, but continues to be available for use with other datasets."

For Analyze in Excel, apparently it won't disable unless your using SSAS as a data source

2) "It's important to know that using Analyze in Excel exposes all detail-level data to any users with permission to the dataset."

Now, what I haven't tested, is whether or not "permission" is shared, or edit/read on the workspace.

A couple recommendations:

Check to see if you have the same behavior if you only share the report itself, not the app.

Ensure the user is not part of the app workspace.

What is the intent here? You keep mentioning security, so you only want end users to be able to see the reports and not export at all in any way?

[Anonymous]

@Seth_C_Bauer

Not being able to turn off "Analyze in Excel" makes the option in the report to only allow "Summarized" export useless. The usecase is exactly that, we want the users to export the summarized data in tables, but not all the underlying data.

[Barendnu · Accepted solution]

I completely agree with MrSisense here.

We want some workspace users to view our report, download summerized Excel data, but not view/download the underlying data (of course also not via "Analyze in Excel"). This seems not to be possible currently.

[EDIT: A workaround has been posted here]

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@Anonymous There is another setting specific to "Analyze in Excel" in the tenant settings under "Integration Settings" have you disabled the "Use Analyze in Excel with on-premises datasets" capability?

[Anonymous]

@Seth_C_Bauer

Disabling this does not actually disable it if the export setting is turned off.