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Enable Power BI workspace Viewer role to access read-only dataset from Excel Pivot Table query

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Michael Barry's profile image

Michael Barry on 09 Aug 2023 19:25:30

Allow users who have the Viewer role permission in a workspace where a dataset is saved to be able to create a data connection to the dataset from Excel and read data into Pivot Tables.


The ability to pull data in Excel from a Power BI dataset is amazing functionality and opens up a lot of use cases, but currently it requires that the user have at least the Contributor role in the workspace. This is disadvantageous because it limits the scope of users that could then access datasets from Excel because it may not be possible to give Contributor access to a broad set of users since it would enable those users to add or change content in the workspace; this breaks security access controls.


Reading data from a Power BI service dataset in Excel should be a read-only function and therefore, the Viewer role (which should be a read-only role) should be re-configured to allow for this.