How to mass upload Power BI reports to the Power BI Service

This sounds like a strange case but I recently had to find an efficient way to upload over 600 Power BI reports to the Power BI Service.

There is no native way to do this but searching through forums I found a solution using PowerShell.

Requirements

You only need Windows PowerShell ISE (which should be installed on any Windows computer)

Step 1)

Make sure you have all Power BI files in one folder on your computer.

Step 2)

Let us now run Windows PowerShell ISE as an administrator and add the packages required.

For uploading only to your personal workspace run this:

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt.Reports

If you want to upload to a "real" workspace, paste this code and hit enter:

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt.Reports
Install-Module -Name MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt.Workspaces

You might be asked to install other addons/modules based on your setup.

Here you can find a list of all Power BI Cmdlets for Windows PowerShell.

Step 3)

Get a list of all files in a folder.

In my case I had over 600 reports so I did not want to do anything manually.

Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\Users\grego\Downloads\sample-reports" -Recurse -File -Name

The highlighted path needs to be changed to yours.

Step 4)

Let us run the script below to start mass uploading files to a Power BI workspace of our choice.

For simplicity I only included two reports in the list below but I have been able to upload over 600 reports using this script. It took about 30 minutes.

Connect-PowerBIServiceAccount
$reports = @(
'100% Clustered Stacked Bar Chart (Pro).pbix',
'100% Clustered Stacked Bar Chart (Standard).pbix'
)

$path = 'C:\Users\grego\Downloads\sample-reports'

$workspaceName = 'other-custom-viz'
$workspace = Get-PowerBIWorkspace -Name $workspaceName

# Iterate through each report in the array and publish it
foreach ($report in $reports) {
    $reportPath = Join-Path -Path $path -ChildPath $report
    $reportName = [System.IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($report)
    New-PowerBIReport -Path $reportPath -Name $reportName -Workspace $workspace }

I have highlighted all the fields you need to change to make it work with your setup.

As you can see we will have an array of report names in the $reports variable

$path just gives the local path on my machine where I have the .pbix files I want to upload

$workspaceName is the name of the workspace you want to upload your reports to

Once you hit enter it will trigger an authentication and then it will start uploading all the reports you listed in the script. It will look something like this while running

Since it will take some time you can just let it work in the background.

As mentioned above it took me about 30 minutes to upload all 627 reports.

When opening the Power BI Service, you will see the reports coming into your workspace while the script is running.

Having hundreds of models and reports in one workspace is quite a performance nightmare and should be avoided at all costs.