Secure and Share Part I: Understanding Personalized views in Power BI

As the world of data expands, so the level of security! Organizations have some regulations for the data access for people working in different departments or different locations of the same organization. Data breach can have serious implications on organizations reputation, including severe financial losses. Its the duty of Data Analysts to place security regulations on reports which are shared by the client or within the organization. Different people should have data access only which they are supposed to.

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Personalized views, Row level security and object level security are security options provided by Power BI . While Row level security and Object level security deals with setting up a report in such a way that users can access limited data, Personalized views deal with providing limited access to change the report.

Here, I will be demonstrating how to implement security by creating Personalized views.

I am using below dataset.

I have created a small report to show how we can implement Personalized views.

In the File menu of Power BI, make sure Personalize visual should be in 'ON' state.

Now, we can choose different visuals to allow Personalization.

Now, for the objects which you want to make personalized visual in 'ON' state, keep this option on, else whatever you want to keep hidden, make Personalized visual as 'OFF'.

Now, for Bar chart of Count of internet sales by Contract and Gender, I am keeping Personalized visual as 'ON', for all others, I am keeping it as 'OFF'

Personalized view is allowing the user to change some of fields in visuals, and limiting others.

After creating personalized views, we can publish the report to power BI service to see the changes.

Below is the visual on which we kept Personalized view as 'OFF' so we are not able to see an extra icon on this visual in power BI service.

This is the visual for which personalized view was kept as 'ON', and we can personalize by clicking on this icon.

In conclusion, implementing Personalized views allow the users to have some flexibility, and can avoid future overhead costs, which may result if the client wants some changes in the report after sharing, and at the same time, data security and privacy is maintained.

Thanks for reading!