How do report users create personal Dashboards from reports in several work spaces?

[birdie29]

Hi Everyone

Maybe I've not set-up Power BI in the best way, but I was hoping members of multiple workspaces would be able to create dashboards in 'My Workspace' and pin tiles from reports housed in any of these workspaces.

I think the way Power BI will be used where I work is that the business analyst's will create the reports and then the users will review and maybe create their own dashboards of the key things important to them. I don't envisage users ever creating their own reports as our data is just too complex and therefore too easy to create inaccurate reports.

I gave a collegue edit access to the workspace and that allowed her to pin tiles to a dashboard in the same workspace but now everyone can view it. It's not a deal breaker but we could end up with a situation where there's hundreds of dashboards which everyone can see but only of use to the person who created it. This solution however does not allow her to pin tiles from reports in various workspaces and that potentially is a deal breaker.

Hopefully I'm missing something and there is a better solution?!

Thank you
Chris

[v-qiuyu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @birdie29,

If I understood correctly, you created a report in one Power BI group workspace, and granted edit permission for a group member. And you wanted the group member to create their own dashboard in their My Workspace, and pinned tiles from the group report to their own dashboard, right?

In your scenario, you can create a content pack to package the report you created in the group workspace and publish it to this group. Then when group member sign in their Power BI Service, they can Get Data-> My Organization-> search the content pack name, get the report. Then they can pin tiles from this report to their dashboard.

Reference:

Organizational content packs: Introduction

Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu

[birdie29]

Thank you @v-qiuyu-msft, you understood my query perfectly.

Whilst this is a valid solution, it's not ideal as users have to copy the reports before creating their personal Dashboards.

The issue with this is that the user may ammend their report and either break it or produce in-accurate data. Finance will then have the challene of understanding how they altered the report and potentially give a lot of training to to avoid the issue happening again. Worse still is if they then share their inaccurate dashboard or report and descisions are made from it!

Furerthermore I envisage making updates to reports fairly frequently but this would potentially make users custom dashboards redundant as they will use old versions of the report and therefore waste their time making them again.

In my eyes it would be ideal if a user could pin any visualisation from any report they have access to, onto a Dashboard they created.

Am I missing something or is this available?

[v-qiuyu-msft]

Hi @birdie29,

I would suggest you take a look at this article to know the life cycle of the content pack firstly: The life cycle of an organizational content pack. Every time the content pack is updated, there will throw a message to prompt the end user to get the updated content pack. Then they can pin the visual from the updated content pack to their own dashboard again. The end user needn't to create report by themselves. And when they make a copy of the content pack and create their own report, all the changes will not reflect to original content pack.

In your scenario, if you don't want the group member to edit the report, please only grant them view only permission.

By the way, currently there is no OOTB feature for us to pin visual from shared dashboard to their own dashboard. You can vote on this idea item: Allow pinning of a shared dashboard's reports to a new personal dashboard.

Best Regards,

Qiuyun Yu

[birdie29]

Hi @v-qiuyu-msft

Thanks again for your reply and for mentioning the idea, I have given it 3 votes 🙂

I've re-read the article you kindly shared; from our testing the user could not directly pin tiles from the reports they picked up from the content pack. It appears the user must save a copy of the reports and dashboards first, then pin tiles from their copies.

As soon as they make copies the users can then remove/add data fields in the report copies, which could lead to ambiguity between what finance share and the users share. Whilst this isn't likely, curious employees at least have the option.

What I also fail to understand is, say I set-up a 'Project workspace', why would I then set-up a content pack based on this workspace if I didn't want users to create copies of the report? The article mentions you can email the team but Workspaces work like that too. The users would effectively be looking at the same data as the 'Project Workspace'.

We may have to end up using this method until it's altered but it's far from ideal.

Thanks again for you help.

Chris

[lcanal]

@birdie29, did you find a solution?

We have exactly the same problem.