Author: Alexander González

When you add a person to a Workspace the first thing that should be kept in mind is what level of permissions you want to grant. In Power Bi exists 4 roles of access that allow different types of modifications in the Workspace, being Admin the role with more permissions and Viewer the less.

How to add a user and assign a role in your workspace

In order to add a user, you need to be in your workspace and find the button “access”, click it.

After it, a window will open and there you can select the level of access you want to give. This is possible to select in the window below the email.

Once the role is assigned, you can change it later in the access window and clicking the more options icon of the user.

Best Practices:

• Fewer Admins as possible.
• Assign the lowest role permission possible for the task to do.
• Assign Admin role if needed to have all the permissions in the workspace.
• Assign Member role if needed to change permissions but not change the admin permissions.
• Assign Contributor role if needed to upload or change data in the workspace.
• Assign Viewer role if only needed to read data.

In Power BI Service, roles can be assigned to users, filtering data they can access it. This doesn’t restrict the access to the Datasets.

To do this, firstly, you need to define roles and his appropriate rules in Power BI Desktop, specifying what data is going to be filtered to that type of user. In the modeling tab, click on Manage Roles -> Create

After creating the role, you need to click in every table you want to filter with a DAX expression (only can be TRUE/FALSE). In this example, I will create a role for Spanish users, filtering only sales made in Spain. Once we are done, in the bottom right corner, we click Save. Roles are assigned in the Power BI Service to each user.

This Row Level Security filter, by default, uses single-directional filters. To able bi-directional filters with RLS integrated, you only need to click on “Apply security filter in both directions”

To test it how will look, in the modeling tab, click on View As -> “Your role” (In this example case, Spain). Also, you can set several roles simultaneously, as a user can have more than one or set a specific user.

Assign roles to user it’s very simple. You can add members external to your organization, but you can’t add Groups created in Power BI. In the Power BI Service go to your Dataset -> Security and assign each user to his role.

To validate everything works fine and the role has been assigned properly, click more options right to the role and “Test as role” (pics)

Alerts are a powerful tool which brings a very important feature, get notified when data changes. In order to be activated, these alerts will need to meet a certain condition, for example, an alert which will be triggered when total sales are more or equal than 500$.

To create alerts, we firstly need to have/create a dashboard where we will be putting our tiles with data that we want to notify us when changes. Alerts can be set in your personal workspace. Also, it can be set on workspaces with premium capacity or if you have the pro license. Other thing to have in mind, only KPI, Cards and Gauges can be alerts.

Creating a dashboard is very simple. First, you need to enter in your personal workspace (or a shared one), click on New -> Dashboard and create it with the name of your choice, for this article I will call it “Dashboard Tutorial”

Once the dashboard is created, we will be adding our tiles there with the data we want to notify us when changes.

First, we need to pin a tile in the dashboard. To do this, we need to go inside our report, choose the Card/KPI/Gauge we want and pin it to our dashboard clicking the “Pin” icon. 

If we, did it correctly, it will be in our dashboard as a tile

Now, with our tile in the dashboard, the next and most important step is creating the alert. If we hover the mouse over the tile, we can see in the top right corner three dots, click them. A menu will appear, go to “Manage Alerts”

Now, in the Manage Alerts tab, we need to add a rule for the alert, in my example, I want to get notified when my sales surpass 15,000 with a maximum notification of 1 per day. Once we set the rule how we want, our last step is clicking on Save and Close.

When the alert is triggered, a bell will appear above our alert in the dashboard (and if we clicked the “Send me email, too” option, an email will be sent to us too.)