Fulfilling a long-standing request to make it easier to administrate Power BI content, it is now possible to use a dataset from one app workspace as the source for a report published to another workspace. The key benefit is to centralize data sourcing and modeling while allowing decentralized visualization and publication. This will work great in combination with dataflows.
The key limitation to keep in mind is that this is a feature of the new workspace experience, so it’s not going to work with a source dataset located in a legacy O365-based workspace. Thankfully, you can sort that out quickly.
Here’s what you need to do:
- [Power BI Desktop] Publish your source dataset in an app workspace created with the new experience (the one that does not automatically create an Office 365 group).
- [Power BI Service] Optionally, promote this dataset as this is presumably going to be one of your sources of record.
- [Power BI Desktop] Open your live connection dataset and go to Home > Edit Queries > Data Source Settings. Point to the dataset you just published. You’ll find it easily if you promoted it.
- [Power BI Desktop] Click Publish, you’ll see other workspaces – besides the one the source dataset comes from – are now available as publication destination.
Source Documentation
- Create the new workspaces in Power BI
- Use datasets across workspaces
- Create reports based on datasets from different workspaces
- Promote your dataset
- Connect to datasets in the Power BI service from Power BI Desktop
- Shared & Certified datasets in Power BI (video):