Recently I got a question on the Power BI Community forum which was “Is it possible to allow multiple users to use the same data source for their report”?

I thought it would be a great blog post so that other users could also benefit from this knowledge, as once you know it is quite a simple process to complete

Adding users

The first thing to note is that you would need to be the owner of the connection. If you are not the owner of the connection you will need to speak to your Power BI Gateway Admin to ask them to grant you the permissions to the connection.

Now in my example I have got a data connection called “AdventureWorks” and I want to grant another user access to be able to use this as a source on their report.

I click on the settings icon and then select “Manage connections and gateways”.

Now when the page loads on the top right-hand side, I then search for my data source. The reason I search for it is quite often there can be a lot of data sources.

I can then see my data source as shown below.

I then hover over AdventureWorks, click on the three dots … and select Manage Users

I then search for the user whom I want to be able to use this connection, as shown below I search for “Pro”

I then select the user and by default the user gets the permission of User (which allows the user to use the data source)

I then click on Share, and get the confirmation.

I also can now see multiple users for my data source.

Now when Pro goes to his dataset, he can use the AdventureWorks data source.

Summary

In this blog post I have shown how to share a data source with a single user, but this could be used for multiple users to use the same data source.

I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful.

Thanks for reading