Is there a way I can publish a report and allow my customers to be able to upload their own data

[warshauecr]

Is there any way for my customers to upload their own data to a report I published and built for them? Ideally, I would like to be able to create reports and allow my customers to populate them with their own data without having to buy or install Power Bi on each customer's machine. Is there any way to do this?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

PBI SSRS ships with a web based implementation for hosting Excel sheets. You could use these sheets as a data source which would be one way of doing it. Not sure how well it responds when someone is editing the Excel as you are querying data. I know SSIS just throws its toys out of the pram and says "no way" if someone has the file open. I'm not a big fan of using Excel as a data source, users do tend to fat finger stuff far too often for my liking.

The other option is to implement somehting like Radzen onto a set of database tables and give your users a web interface they can effectively edit data in a DB with, we used to do this with LightSwitch all the time. You can use the DB backend as a live query in your PBI. We do this with a ton of finance forecasting where the users want to edit the profile of various estimated accounts/spends. Though we're having to move all our LightSwitch apps to Radzen now LS is no longer supported. Its pretty easy to get this running as long as it doesn't need to be super polished fornt end wise.

You can use temporal tables or old fashioned triggers to keep the old copies of the data in the DB tables so you can roll changes backwards if you need to and or be able to look at the data at a point in time.

Uploading entire Excels is a different level of complexity and PBI Desktop is definitely the way to go there unless you want to burn a ton of time on developing something.

Proud to be a data ninja.

Killing off poor quality data sets one at a time...

[Greg_Deckler]

Not sure there is anything currently for this other than Power BI Template files, which I think are kind of going away or being replaced by something else.