Power BI Service – How to disable Analyze in Excel (Disable Users from Downloading any data from Power BI)
I was recently looking how to help out in the Power BI Community where there was a question around how to disable users from having the ability to disable Analyze in Excel in the Power BI Service.
This could be a very valid situation where you do not want users the ability to export or download any data from the Power BI Service, but rather only have a view of the data, this is how you can achieve this. This includes the Export Data Option on the visuals.
NOTE: When you make this change it does the change for your entire Tenant. So please be aware of this.
A work around might to be enable Row Level Security, so that only the users who have access to the data can see the data. The result would then be when a user uses the Analyze in Excel and they browse the data, they will get data returned based on their security.
Change Tenant Settings
The first thing is that you will need to have access to the Admin Portal in the Power BI Service.
To see if you are an Admin you should see the option below.
Click on Settings to see the list of settings options.
If you can see the Admin Portal, click on the Admin Portal.
Now once in the Admin Portal you will need to click on the Tenant settings as shown below.
Next scroll down and change the following options:
- Export data to Off
- Allow users to use Analyze in Excel with on-premises datasets to Off
This is shown below.
NOTE: You have to have to both settings above set to Off for the Analyze in Excel option to be removed.
Then click Apply at the bottom of the page.
After you click Apply you will get a notification letting you know that it will take typically 5-10 minutes for the changes to take effect.
Once the 5-10 minutes is up you can then go back into your reports or datasets and you will see that the option for Analyze in Excel is now longer there.
Conclusion
So by changing the Tenant settings as explained above, your users will no longer have the ability to export any data from the Power BI Service, either by using the Export Data option on a visual, or the Analyze in Excel option on the Reports or Datasets.
Hi
I have disabled the Analyze in Excel-option in the Admin portal. But the option Analyze in Excel is still available in the PowerBI-site for the users. I can’t get this work properly.
We use mainly Reports based on a SQL-database, some with direct queries some imported.
Hi there
As far as I know when you disable it in the admin portal, it will still display, but when the users try and actually use it, that is when it will fail.
Hi Gilberd
On my compagny we would like to forbid Analyse in Excel for certain users ( With BUILD access on some datasets)
Without avoid possibility to export (excel) from visuals
What are please admin tenant setups to avoid analyez in Excel on jully 21 ;>) ?
But let excel export from visuals ?
– Allow live connections ? maybe yes
-Allow XMLA endpoints and Analyze in Excel with on-premises datasets ? sound to work only with Analysis Service xmla end point connections on Excel
-Export to Excel ? Not sure , seems to be to much drastic
We saw 3 options on tanenant adim
– Live acces
– Expo
– XMLA
Which one(s) please you can advise us to use
Thanks a lot
Hi Christophe,
I am not sure if this is entirely possible.
What you can do is to first allow users in the tenant admin who can have live access and XMLA, this will allow them to connect via Excel.
Users not in here will not be able to connect via Excel
The reason is that the tenant settings will override or will always work no matter if a user gets build access.
Exporting to Excel will allow them to export data from visuals or tables. What you can do is on the report settings disable exporting of data.
This solution will apply to all reports under that tenant , what if we can to disable this for a report specific not for all reports ??
Hi Eric,
Unfortunately, as it stands today, there is only a tenant white option for this.
Thanks for confirming.