Who can see what in your reports

This is one of the questions we get asked most frequently on our Power BI Desktop course. What data can people see when you publish a report?

For this report ...	... I've applied this filter.

Where you may have problems

The test will be whether someone can drill down to see the data in your report:

In Power BI Desktop you can drill down to see the data or records for a visualisation.

This shows all of the data which feed into the visualisation:

However, you can only see the data meeting the current filter set.

Published reports

After publishing the report above, I can click on this button to export data:

You can export data from a published visualisation.

Worryingly, you can choose to export all of the underlying data for a visualisation:

You can export the data for our chart to an Excel workbook.

The results?  A full spreadsheet of the data which feed into the visualisation:

So if you publish a visualisation, you're also publishing access to the underlying data.

Shared dashboards

With dashboards, the situation is similar.  You can click on any dashboard to go to the underlying report:

You can also open a dashboard's menu to do the same thing, using the option shown above.

From there, you can export the report's data as before.  You can also choose to export the dashboard's data, although this only gives you the data shown in the dashboard:

If you choose this option, you get a CSV file of the data shown in the dashboard.

Here's what you would see for this example:

A CSV file giving the data shown in the dashboard.

This doesn't claim to be an exhaustive study, but it seems that when you share reports or dashboards, you have to accept that people can see the underlying data.