Why this matters
A report on your computer helps nobody else. In organisations, Power BI reports are published to the Power BI service, shared with the right people, and refreshed automatically so nobody has to rebuild them. You may not do this yourself until you join an organisation, because the service needs a work or school account. But interviewers ask how sharing and refresh work, and knowing the risks, especially of "publish to web", protects you and your employer.
Publishing
In Power BI Desktop, Home, then Publish sends the report and its data (called a semantic model) to the Power BI service. You must sign in with a work or school account. You choose a workspace:
- My workspace is your personal area. A free licence lets you publish here for yourself.
- Shared workspaces are for teams. Sharing reports with colleagues usually needs a paid licence for the people involved, which the organisation manages.
Finished reports are often bundled into an app, which users open on the web or in the Power BI mobile apps.
Keeping data fresh
When you publish, the data is a snapshot from your last refresh. To keep it current, the organisation sets a scheduled refresh in the semantic model's settings, such as every morning at six. How it reaches the data depends on where the data lives: