Sharing Power BI Reports with External Users – Part 2: Hands-On Guide to Setup and Sharing

In Part one of this series, we covered the foundational concepts behind sharing Power BI reports with external users. We explained why this is more complex than it seems, outlined the key requirements, clarified essential terms like guest users and Entra ID, and defined the roles involved in setting up secure external access.

Now that we have the groundwork in place, it’s time to walk through the process step by step.

This blog is based on the walkthrough portion of my YouTube video published in April 2025, where I explained the scenario and how to implement it, from configuring the necessary settings to sharing reports across two Azure tenants.

Here’s a quick guide to the full series:

• Part 1: Understanding the Problem and Core Concepts
  This post explains why external sharing can be tricky, the key requirements to get it working, important terminology, user roles, and how the whole process fits together.
• Part 2: Hands-On Guide to Setup and Sharing (this blog)
  A step-by-step walkthrough of how to share reports across tenants, covering licensing, admin portal settings, inviting guest users, and how report access looks from the guest’s side.
• Part 3: Sensitivity Labels, Encryption, and Secure Sharing
  An in-depth look at what happens when Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels are applied, including access control, encryption, and key admin settings you may need to adjust for secure collaboration.

In this post, we’ll focus on a practical scenario. One organisation, let’s call it Tenant A, wants to share a Power BI report with someone from another organisation, Tenant B. We’ll cover everything from verifying licenses to configuring the Fabric Admin Portal and inviting the external user. If you’re looking to follow along, this guide will give you a clear path to replicate the same setup in your environment.

If you like to listen to the content on the go, here is the AI generated podcast explaining everything about this blog 👇.

https://biinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Sharing-Power-BI-Reports_-Hands-On-Guide.wav

If you are someone who prefers video over reading, you can watch the full walkthrough here 👇.

Scenario Overview

Let’s imagine we have two different Azure tenants. One belongs to the organisation that owns the Power BI report (Tenant A) and the other belongs to a partner or customer who needs access to that report (Tenant B).

The objective is to share a report from Tenant A with a user in Tenant B, in a secure and controlled way.

We will go through the steps the admin and report owner in Tenant A need to follow to make this work properly.

Step 1: Verify Power BI Licensing

Before setting up anything, make sure both users involved have a valid Power BI license. This might seem obvious, but it is a very common reason why external sharing fails or behaves unexpectedly.

In the demo example:

• The report owner in Tenant A has a Power BI Pro license.
• The external user from Tenant B (named Nestor) also has a Power BI Pro license.

You can confirm this by clicking the Account Picker icon in Microsoft Fabric and looking at the License type. If the external user does not already have a Pro or PPU license, you either need to assign one through your tenant or ask them to obtain the license.

Step 2: Check Admin Portal Settings

In Tenant A, a Fabric admin must check that the tenant allows external sharing. These settings are found in the Fabric Admin Portal.

Do the following:

1. Click the Settings button on top right
2. Click the Admin Portal link
3. Select Tenant Settings
4. Search guest to find all related settings
5. Expand the Guest users can access Microsoft Fabric setting

6. Enable this setting if disabled
7. Select The entire organisation option for now
8. Click the Apply button

If you want more control, you can apply this setting only to selected security groups instead of enabling it for the whole organisation. More on this in the third part of this series, so stay tuned for that (or just watch my YouTube video to the end).

The key point here is to only enable what is truly needed in the admin portal. A common best practice in system administration is to start with everything disabled and enable features only when there is a clear, specific reason. Even then, it’s important to scope the configuration narrowly and apply it only to users or groups that really require it. So I recommend disabling the following settings unless you truly need them:

• Users can invite guest users to collaborate through item sharing and permissions
• Guest users can browse and access Fabric content
• Users can see guest users in lists of suggested people
• B2B guest users can set up and be subscribed to email subscriptions
• Allow specific users to turn on external data sharing

Many organisations miss this step and wonder why external sharing fails. Always double check the admin settings.

Step 3: Invite the Guest User

Next, you need to invite the external user to your tenant. This can be done through the Fabric Admin Portal which navigates us to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. We can also use Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) from Azure Portal to achieve the same thing.

Note that to invite and manage guest users, you need to have one of the following roles:

1. Global Administrator: Full control over the tenant, including inviting external users.
2. User Administrator: Can manage users, including inviting external guests.
3. Teams Administrator: Can manage guest access settings in Microsoft Teams.
4. SharePoint Administrator: Can configure external sharing settings for SharePoint and OneDrive.
5. Fabric Administrator: Has access to user management settings and can configure external collaboration settings.

You can control exactly who in your organisation is allowed to invite external users. This level of control is useful for larger organisations with strict governance rules, but managing it properly is beyond the scope of this blog post. If you want to explore this further, have a look at this article on Microsoft Learn.

Follow these steps from the Fabric Admin Portal:

1. Click Users.
2. Click the Go to Microsoft 365 Admin Center button.
3. On the Microsoft 365 Admin Center expand the Users section.
4. Click the Guest Users.
5. Click the Add a guest user button.
6. Select the Invite user option.
7. Enter the guest user’s Name and Email.
8. Click the Invite button.

The invited user will receive an email and, once they accept it and provide the required consent, their account becomes a guest user in your tenant.

Guest accounts often look like this:
username_domain.com#EXT#@yourtenant.com

This format confirms that the account is external.

You can now assign them access to reports or workspaces just like any user in your Entra ID.

Step 4: Share the Report

Once the user appears in your tenant as a guest, users who have either Member or Admin roles on the workspace, or those who have been explicitly granted the Reshare permission on the report, can share it with the guest user.

There are multiple ways for sharing a report with others, depending on your user roles. The following steps explain the most straightforward one which sharing the report fromt the report itself. To do so, go to the Power BI service, open the report you want to share, and follow these steps:

1. Click Share.
2. Select who you would like the sharing to work for.
3. Select the Specific people option.
4. Ensure both Allow recipients to share this report and Allow recipients to build content with the data associated with this report options are not ticked (unless you need to grant these capabilities to the person who you are sharing the report with).
5. Click the Apply button.
6. Enter the email(s) of the guest user(s) (depending on your Fabric Admin configurations, their email may or may not appear after you start typing. If you followed the instructions in this blog, we have disabled this setting earlier so you need to enter the recipients email addresses completely and press enter to add them to the list.).
7. Enter an optional message to the recipients.
8. Click the Send button.

The guest user will receive a link to the report in their email inbox.

As explained in the first blog of this series, you can also share the report via a Power BI app if that fits your use case, though this blog focuses on direct report sharing.

Step 5: Test the Guest User Access

Now test what the guest user sees.

When they click the shared link, they will be redirected to your organisation’s Power BI service. They login using their own credentials.

After the guest user accesses the report for the first time, even if they own a Power BI Pro license, they will get the following warning message:

All paid features of Power Bl are yours for 60 days: Looks like you wanted to access a shared report. We’ve given you a free trial of Power Bl paid features for 60 days so you can navigate Power Bl freely. Learn more about the details of this trial.

I believe this message must only show if the guest user does not have a proper license. But that’s unfortunately not the case. You can go ahead and click the Got it button.

Just be aware that by clicking the Got it button, a Trial Premium Per User (PPU) license is being activated for you (unless the trialing paid features setting is disabled from the Fabric Admin Portal).

If you want to cancel the already added trial licence, you can do it by clicking the Cancel trial button from the Profile menu.

You may still get one more notification as follows, just ignore it, you should be fine.

Your free Premium Per User trial has expired (dont worry, you’ll still have access to Pro features). Upgrade to continue using Premium Per User features.

If everything is set up properly:

• The guest user will land on the report.
• They will be able to view and interact with it (depending on their permissions).

Note: It is a good practice to walk your guest users through this process in advance so they are not surprised.

Step 6: Show the Guest Users How to Access the Shared Report

There are a couple of ways the guest users can access the shared report. They can:

• Access the report from the Home under the From the external orgs tab. This tab contains all resources that are shared with the guest user, from an external organisation, including reports and semantic models.

• Access by switching between tenants using the Profile menu.

Some people prefer to bookmark the report in their browser and access it from there. It is important to show the end users their options so that they can pock the one that is best for them.

Conclusion

This blog covered a step-by-step walkthrough of securely sharing a Power BI report across Microsoft 365 tenants.

We discussed:

• Verifying user licensing
• Checking and configuring Fabric Admin Portal settings
• Inviting guest users via Microsoft Entra ID
• Sharing the report directly from the Power BI service
• What the guest user experience looks like

This process is straightforward once you understand the moving parts, and with the right setup, external report sharing can be both secure and user-friendly.

In the final part of this series, we will look at what happens when Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels are applied to a report, and refining your admin settings for stronger governance.

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