Connecting to Shared Calendar in Power BI Desktop & Creating Reports

[monaraya]

Recently, I came across a scenario where the user is trying to access his colleague’s calendar details that are shared with him in Power BI Desktop.

Provided that the user had permissions within Shared Calendar properties, they were seeing below error in Power BI Desktop:

In order to connect successfully to a Shared Calendar, please make sure to follow the below steps:

NOTE: Usually we only share Calendar permissions with the user – and this permission is not sufficient.

If user A wants to access the shared calendar of user B, perform the below steps in user B’s Outlook settings.

1. Open Outlook of user B and navigate to Outlook Folder permissions as shown below:

2. Within Folder Permissions, add the access for user A & provide “Reviewer” role.

3. Post this, make sure the calendar is shared with user A with “can view all details” access. Click on the calendar tab and you should find the Share button. Right-click for calendar properties.

4. After this, we can go to Power BI Desktop and connect to the data. Click on “Get data” and select “Microsoft Exchange Online”.

5. Now, enter user B’s mailbox address. This step is tricky, as one might think they need user B’s password (NOT TRUE).Instead, enter the e-mail address and select “Microsoft account” as the authentication method.

6. After selecting this, authenticate using user A’s credentials.

Thus, you can view the shared calendar in Power BI.

Author: Sheetal Shetty

Reviewer: Mounika Narayana Reddy