You can now export Power BI data to Excel from your phone. Check what your viewers can take out

Can you export Power BI data to Excel from the mobile app now?

Yes. Microsoft confirms it on its page about exporting data from a Power BI visualization, which it updated on 20 August 2026. It now includes a section called Export data from the Power BI mobile app. This covers the apps for iOS and Android, and the August 2026 What’s new page lists it under Mobile as Export data to Excel in the Power BI mobile app.

The process is short. You open a report in the app, and then you open a visual in focus mode or tap More options, which is the three dots. Then you pick Export data. The export begins by itself in the Excel format that the visual supports, and you use the normal sharing menu on the phone to open, save or share the file when it is ready.

I read Microsoft’s pages on 26 October 2026, and everything I explain here comes from those documents, because I have not run this on a phone myself. Those pages do not mention if the phone lets the viewer choose between summarized and underlying data, which is a choice they get in a web browser. I treat the report setting as the real limit because of this unknown, no matter which export type the phone decides to use.

What ends up in the file when someone exports from a phone?

Microsoft states that the exported data matches your current filters, slicers, drill state and row-level security. This means the file copies exactly what the viewer is looking at on their screen right then. The file will only hold one region if they filtered the chart to that region. The file will follow the same path if they drilled down from a country into its cities.

Row-level security is often called RLS, and it is a setting that limits the rows a specific person can view in a report. A sales rep might only see their own customers, for example. The export follows RLS, so a viewer cannot export data rows they are not allowed to look at. This offers good peace of mind, and it acts as your strongest protection, but this only works if you actually set RLS up when you built the report.

Most report owners are not used to this next part. A file exported on a laptop goes to a Downloads folder and usually sits there for a time. But on a phone, the share menu appears next, so the file can end up in an email, a chat group or a personal cloud drive in a few seconds. Power BI has finished its task by that point, and the person holding the phone controls what happens to the file next.

Who decides what a viewer is allowed to export?

Three different layers control this, and looking at them in order helps make sense of it. The Power BI admin sits at the top, and they control the tenant settings for the entire organisation. The report designer sits below that, and this is usually you. The viewer’s personal permissions and row-level security sit at the bottom.

You will find the admin layer in the export and sharing tenant settings. Two settings matter here. The first is Export to Excel, which allows a user to export a visual’s data into an Excel file, and the second is Export to .csv. The export page from Microsoft states that the admin settings will win if they conflict with the report settings.

Most people forget about the report layer entirely. You find this in Power BI Desktop by going to File, then Options and settings, and then Options. You pick Report settings under the CURRENT FILE heading. The Export data section gives you three choices there, and you can adjust this exact setting inside the Power BI service too.

Microsoft includes one line under these options that I think is very good advice. They say report designers should go back to old reports and manually change the export option if they need to. This matters more today than it used to. You might have built a report a year ago when exports only worked on a laptop, and that report might allow more data to leave than you want to allow today.

Why can underlying data show columns the chart never shows?

This detail often catches people out, so I will give a simple example. Imagine your chart shows sales by region. The visual only uses two fields, which are Region and Sales. A summarized export provides the viewer with exactly those two things, giving them one total number for every region.

An underlying data export behaves in a different way. Microsoft provides a table that says an export for a measure can include all nonhidden data from the tables that hold that measure. Their page also notes that fields hidden on the visual are never included, except when exporting underlying data. So your sales table might also contain customer names, profit margins or a notes column, and an underlying export can pull those out even if the viewer never saw them on the actual chart.

Microsoft mentions that underlying data might require Build permission. This permission lets someone reuse a semantic model, which is the data model sitting behind the report, for their own work. This means not every viewer will have it. I would not rely on this rule to protect my data, because people often get wider permissions over time for other reasons.

I wrote about this same lesson in hiding a Looker Studio page from a client. The information on the screen is not the same as the data hiding behind it, and hiding a field on a visual is only a choice about the display. You should hide a column in the model itself if it must never leave, or keep it completely out of the model the viewer can access.

How do I check what my report lets people export?

This check takes around five minutes for each report, and I advise doing it for every report you share with people outside your own small team. You will need Power BI Desktop and the report file to do this, or you need edit rights on the report inside the service.

1. 01
   Open the report setting

   File, Options and settings, Options, then Report settings under CURRENT FILE. Read what the Export data section is set to today.
2. 02
   Pick the narrowest choice that still works

   Summarized is enough for most people who read a report. Allow underlying only for people who genuinely work with the rows, and choose no export for a report that holds client or staff details without row-level security.
3. 03
   Look at what sits in the tables behind each visual

   For any visual built on a measure, check what else lives in that table. Columns nobody should take out go hidden in the model, or out of it.
4. 04
   Test it as a viewer

   Open the report with an account that has viewer rights only, export one visual from the browser, and open the file. What you see in Excel is what a phone user can share.
5. 05
   Ask your admin one question

   Are Export to Excel and Export to .csv on for everyone, or only some groups? Their answer beats your report setting.

I would never skip the test in step four. Looking at a setting tells you what is supposed to happen, but opening the exported file shows you the reality, and it only takes a minute to do. Sometimes a report is just a one page overview, like the kind I talk about in building a Power BI executive dashboard. You should test the detail pages behind those too, because the export follows the drill state and those deeper pages normally hold the most rows.

Should I turn off export for phone users?

The report setting does not let you switch this off just for phones. The setting applies to everyone who opens the report on any device, so the real question you have to ask is what a viewer should be allowed to take out of the report at all. A company might need strict device rules, and Microsoft’s page explains that admins can use Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps to block downloads of sensitive data to unmanaged devices. But that is an IT decision, not a report setting.

I would not panic and turn everything off if you only work with a small team. Exporting data is useful, and people who cannot export a table will often just take a screenshot or write the numbers down by hand. That leaves you with no labels and absolutely no control over the data. A sensible middle ground for most shared reports is to allow summarized exports only, and to add row-level security so different people only see their own customers.

Sometimes a client or a manager really needs the numbers in a file every week. I prefer to send them a controlled file myself, rather than letting it come out of a phone at random times. That is the exact idea I discuss in sending the Power BI report as a PDF and Excel copy with one button, because you get to decide what goes into the file, and you know exactly who received it.

You should know a few limits from the same Microsoft page while you make your decisions, because these limits shape exactly how much data a single export can hold.