4 min readApr 12, 2024

If you’ve ever spent hours meticulously crafting a report in Power BI Service, you might have been dismayed to discover that you can’t download your work as a PBIX file. This limitation prevents further editing in Power BI Desktop and restricts your ability to share or archive your report as a file. Today, I’ll show you a workaround to retrieve your PBIX file without needing advanced technical skills.

Understanding the Limitation

The root of the issue lies in the creation process of the report. Power BI allows for direct report creation in the browser, linked to an existing dataset. However, only reports originally created in Power BI Desktop can be downloaded as PBIX files. This poses a problem for those created directly in Power BI Service.

Here is the same problem reported in PowerBI Community Forum

The Solution: Using the Update Report Content in Group API

The good news is that there’s a solution through the Power BI’s Update Report Content in Group API. This method involves swapping the contents of a downloadable report (created in Desktop) with the one created in Service.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to make it happen:

1. Prepare a Downloadable Report:

Start by creating a new, essentially empty report in Power BI Desktop connected to the same dataset as your non-downloadable report.
Upload this new report to the same workspace where your original report resides.

2. Utilize the Update Report Content in Group API:

- Navigate to the Power BI API documentation and find the ‘Update Report Content in Group’ section. Use the interactive ‘Try It’ feature which is incredibly handy.

The Created in PBI Desktop report is the one to be updated. Let’s say its URL is:

https://app.powerbi.com/groups/7e2f5035-afa4-49c9-8a6d-9c5fdff2245d/reports/d7de9a81-ab33-48d1-b124-0305e4a9276f/ReportSection.

Hence, I can extract:

groupId = 7e2f5035-afa4–49c9–8a6d-9c5fdff2245d
reportId = d7de9a81-ab33–48d1-b124–0305e4a9276f

3. Set API Parameters:

Provide the ‘groupId’ and ‘reportId’ for the new report you uploaded from Power BI Desktop.
Specify the ‘sourceReportId’ of the service-created report you wish to download.
Ensure your API body looks something like this:

In the “sourceReportId” put the ID of your service-created report.
Since both reports are in the same workspace, ‘sourceWorkspaceId’ does not need to be provided, which simplifies the format further:

4. Execute the API Call:

Submit the request by clicking the ‘Run’ button. If successful, “Response Code: 200” will be reported and the content of your Desktop report will be replaced with that from your Service report.

5. Download Your Report:

Now, head back to Power BI Service and download the updated Desktop report. It will contain all visuals, pages, and filters from your original Service-created report.

Conclusion

This method provides a reliable workaround to a common frustration among Power BI users. By leveraging an empty Desktop-created report as a vessel, you can effectively download, edit, and manage reports initially crafted in Power BI Service.

Feel free to share this guide with anyone who might find it helpful, and don’t let the limitations of Power BI Service keep you from maximizing the potential of your data visualizations.