Level 1 · Publish a report and pick the licences

Power BI Desktop is where you build a report. The Power BI Service (app.powerbi.com) is where other people use it: in the browser, in Teams and in the Power BI mobile app. Getting a report from one to the other is called publishing, and what you may do once it’s there depends on licences.

What you are working in

This level is a quiz: the Service needs a work or school account, so there is nothing to click here. The steps below are the ones you will use at work.

Publishing from Desktop

In Power BI Desktop, save the file, then Home → Publish. Sign in with your work account, pick a destination workspace and press Select. Power BI uploads two things: the report (the pages and visuals) and the semantic model (the data, relationships and measures, called a dataset in older screens). Both appear in the workspace. When you publish again with the same file name, the Service asks whether to Replace the existing items, which keeps their links and settings.

The licences, in plain words

• Free. Build in Desktop and publish to My workspace, a personal area. You can’t publish to shared workspaces, share content, or open what others share with you (unless it sits on paid capacity, below).
• Pro. Publish to shared workspaces, share reports and dashboards, publish and use apps, collaborate. Everyone who shares and everyone who views needs it on normal shared capacity.
• Premium Per User (PPU). Everything in Pro plus Premium features for that person (larger models, more refreshes a day, paginated reports, deployment pipelines). Content in a PPU workspace can only be opened by other PPU users.
• Capacity: Power BI Premium (P SKUs) or Microsoft Fabric (F SKUs). The company buys computing power, not seats. Creators still need Pro or PPU, but on Premium capacity or F64 and larger, people with a Free licence can view content as Viewers or through an app. Smaller F SKUs still need paid licences for viewers.

Reading a licence question

Ask two things. Where does the content live: shared capacity, a PPU workspace, or Premium/Fabric capacity? And what does each person do: build and share, or only view? On shared capacity the answer is almost always “Pro for everyone involved”. On F64 or Premium, “Pro for the builders, Free is fine for readers”.

Common mistakes

• “Viewers are free.” Only on Premium capacity or F64 and up.
• Buying PPU for one person to save money. Their content then needs PPU readers.
• Publishing to My workspace and sending the link. Nobody else can see My workspace; publish to a shared workspace instead.
• Republishing under a new file name. You get a second report and model side by side, and links point at the old one.