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Publishing to the Service: Workspaces, Roles and Licenses

First lesson of the Power BI Service: Publishing, Sharing and RLS Security course, free to read: about 20 minutes, 3 exercises and 3 quiz questions. This is the catalogue's base lesson; in the student space, it is rewritten for your profile.

Objectives

  • Publish a report from Power BI Desktop
  • Tell apart a semantic model, a report, a dashboard and an app
  • Choose the right workspace, roles and license

PublishingWorkspacesLicensesWorkspace roles

From the .pbix file to the service

Until now, your report lived in a file on your computer. For others to view it, for it to refresh automatically and to be secured, you publish it to the Power BI service, Microsoft’s online platform (app.powerbi.com), now integrated into Microsoft Fabric.

In Power BI Desktop, Home > Publish, sign in with your work account, then choose a workspace. Publishing creates two items:

Item Content
Semantic model (formerly dataset) the imported data, tables, relationships, measures, security roles
Report the pages and visuals, connected to this model

If you republish the same file, Power BI offers to replace the existing items.

In the service you will also find:

  • dashboards: a single page where you pin visuals from one or more reports; this is where you can set alerts on cards and KPIs;
  • apps: a package of reports and dashboards distributed to an audience, covered later.

Workspaces

  • My workspace: a personal space, for your experiments. Not meant for sharing.
  • Shared workspaces: one per team, project or domain (“Sales – Production”). You collaborate there and distribute content.

Each person or group added to a workspace receives a role:

Role Can…
Viewer view the content, interact with reports
Contributor additionally create, edit, publish and delete content
Member additionally share content, publish and update the app, add members with a lower or equal role
Admin everything, including managing workspace settings, adding admins, deleting the workspace

Best practice: assign roles to groups (Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft 365) rather than to individuals, and limit the number of admins. Remember one essential security point right now: row-level security (RLS) only applies to users with read rights; Admins, Members and Contributors see all the data.

Licenses

License or capacity Use
Free (Fabric free) personal content in My workspace; view content on an F64 or larger capacity
Pro publish to shared workspaces, share and view other Pro users’ content
Premium Per User (PPU) advanced features (more refreshes, larger models, deployment pipelines…); readers must also have PPU
Fabric capacity (F SKU) dedicated resources for the organization; from F64 upward, readers with a free license can view content

Details (prices, limits) change: check with your administrator or the Microsoft documentation.

Reusing a published model

Rather than duplicating the same data in ten files, publish one reference semantic model and build the reports by connecting to it: in Desktop, Get data > Power BI semantic models. The report then contains no data, only the pages (live connection). You can also add local tables to the shared model, which creates a composite model. This separation between model and reports is the foundation of maintainable enterprise BI.

-- Measures stay defined only once, in the shared model
Total ventes = SUM ( FaitVentes[Montant] )

Exercises

Solutions and tests stay on the server. In the student space, your code is run and checked, and the tutor gives hints before the solution.

  1. TaskDifficulty 12 hints

    Publish the report

    Starting model: the sales and targets report from the previous course (FaitVentes, FaitObjectifs, DimMagasin, DimProduit, Dates; Total ventes = 415). If needed, rebuild at least FaitVentes, DimMagasin and DimProduit from C:\Formation\ventes_plat.csv:

    NumVente,Date,DateLivraison,CodeMagasin,Magasin,Region,CodeProduit,Produit,Categorie,Quantite,PrixUnitaire
V001,2026-01-03,2026-01-05,M1,Lyon,Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes,P01,Jus d'orange,Boissons,10,3
V002,2026-01-03,2026-01-06,M2,Lille,Hauts-de-France,P02,Pates,Epicerie,20,2
V003,2026-01-10,2026-01-12,M3,Nantes,Pays de la Loire,P03,Yaourt,Frais,30,1
V004,2026-01-17,2026-01-19,M1,Lyon,Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes,P04,Riz,Epicerie,15,2
V005,2026-01-24,2026-01-27,M2,Lille,Hauts-de-France,P05,Eau,Boissons,50,1
V006,2026-02-02,2026-02-04,M3,Nantes,Pays de la Loire,P01,Jus d'orange,Boissons,12,3
V007,2026-02-07,2026-02-09,M1,Lyon,Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes,P06,Fromage,Frais,8,6
V008,2026-02-14,2026-02-16,M2,Lille,Hauts-de-France,P03,Yaourt,Frais,25,1
V009,2026-02-21,2026-02-24,M3,Nantes,Pays de la Loire,P02,Pates,Epicerie,18,2
V010,2026-02-28,2026-03-03,M1,Lyon,Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes,P05,Eau,Boissons,40,1
V011,2026-03-06,2026-03-09,M2,Lille,Hauts-de-France,P04,Riz,Epicerie,10,2
V012,2026-03-13,2026-03-16,M3,Nantes,Pays de la Loire,P06,Fromage,Frais,5,6

    Service access: the steps in the Power BI service require the account provided by the training (Pro license, Premium Per User, or a workspace on a Fabric capacity). If you don’t have one, carry out the steps in Power BI Desktop and describe the service steps in writing.

    1. Save the report as ventes-T1.pbix, then Home > Publish.
    2. Publish to the training workspace assigned to you (not My workspace).
    3. In the service, open the workspace: find the semantic model and the report.
    4. Open the report and check the figures.
    • The workspace contains a semantic model and a report named ventes-T1
    • The report shows Total ventes = 415
    • Interactions (slicers, filters) work in the browser

  2. TaskDifficulty 22 hints

    Design the role matrix

    The retail chain has: a BI team of 2 people who build the reports, 1 BI manager, 3 regional directors and 20 sales reps who view them.

    1. Propose the workspace organization (at least one development workspace and one production workspace).
    2. For each population, indicate the workspace role or the access method (app).
    3. Indicate the licenses needed if the organization has no Fabric capacity, then if it has an F64 capacity.
    • Sales reps and directors do not receive an editing role
    • The BI manager is admin; the BI team is member or contributor
    • Without a capacity: Pro (or PPU) license for all users, readers included
    • With F64: readers can have a free license; creators keep a Pro license

  3. Multiple choiceDifficulty 21 hint

    Who bypasses RLS?

    Which users of a workspace are NOT subject to row-level security?

    • Viewers
    • Admins, Members and Contributors
    • Nobody
    • Only the report's author

End-of-lesson quiz

  1. What does publishing a .pbix create?

    • A semantic model and a report
    • Only a PDF
    • An app

  2. Which role lets you publish and edit content without being able to share or manage the workspace?

    • Viewer
    • Contributor
    • Admin

  3. Where do you set alerts on a card value?

    • On a dashboard
    • In Power Query
    • In the theme

The rest of the course

  1. Refreshing Data: Scheduling, Gateway and Incremental Refresh20 min
  2. Sharing and Distributing: Apps, Sharing, Subscriptions15 min
  3. Static and Dynamic Row-Level Security (RLS)20 min
  4. Governance and Lifecycle: Pipelines, Git, Labels, Certification20 min
Build my pathSee the full syllabus

Power BI Service: Publishing, Sharing and RLS Security · Advanced · 1 h 35 min