Can an interactive Power BI report be embedded in an email?

Question

We currently have a pdf report that uses Flash for some interactivity (sorting, filtering, tabs, dropdowns, etc). This pdf report is completely self-contained and is emailed to external customers. There is no log in for the external customers, everything is in the emailed pdf. The data in each report only contains data relevant to that external customer. As this solution uses Flash, we need to find an alternative solution that uses more modern technology. What I would like to know is if it is possible to use Power BI for this use case? Can a Power BI report (self-contained with all the data) be emailed to an external customer? The report would need to have similar interactivity, not have a static snapshot for each option that is in the current pdf report's tabs and dropdowns, resulting in many pages. Is something like this possible in Power BI?

Please help.

Answer 1

You can't embedded an Power BI into a pdf or report the way that you are describing. You can only create static images for embedding into emails/word etc, via the export to pdf, export to power point or screen capture.

If you want a guest user to access your reports, you can add them as a guest user to Power BI and limited rights to the workspace(s), create a portal using Power BI Embedded.

Answer 2

In theory, you could email them the PBIX file where the data included is filtered to only theirs and they could open it in Power BI Desktop. Even though this is a self-contained file, it's a terrible idea from a data security standpoint and requires them to have Power BI Desktop installed.

Power BI is designed to be shared via online reports rather than self-contained documents, so if you're after the latter, then you probably want to consider a different technology.