Why is Contributor Access Needed to Open Semantic Model from Excel?

[Anonymous]

I saw that you can open a semantic model as a pivot table in Excel last week and was quite impressed. I have previously served Multidimensional Analysis Services cubes via Excel to stakeholders and know that business users definitely like this functionality. I was intending to use this as a selling point for a new semantic model I'm currently building but have since found out that the option is only available for users with Contributor access as per the docs here:

 Connect Excel to Power BI semantic models - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

And here:

Semantic model permissions - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

I'm trying to understand why this would only be available to Contributors as it would give stakeholders too many permissions to alter the model itself when really, they only require read access to the data. Does anyone know the rationale behind this limitation and whether this might change in the future? Again, would be a great selling point to business users.

Thanks in advance!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Been digging further and doing a bit of testing around this and you can share a semantic model without giving the end user direct access to the workspace. After some testing, you can give them Build access which allows them to analyse in the Excel pivot table (👌) as well as creating their own report content in the service without having any access to edit the undelying model. Excellent. Thanks Microsoft!!

Build permission for shared semantic models - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

[Anonymous]

Here's some more docs. This is so good but my stakeholders can't use it?! 🤔

Power BI semantic model experience in Excel - Power BI | Microsoft Learn