Let's imagine the common scenario of the necessity to share datasets. If the BI team is made up of more than one person, often the different BI tasks fall to different people. Often on that team, there is a data person who may be in charge of collecting and combining data and preparing it for use. Then you have a whole team of others who specialize in other BI tasks, such as identifying needs or creating and broadcasting insights. Well, the others aren't even able to do their job if they don't have access to the data.

So far in this course, we have discussed tasks around data as they can be performed using Power BI desktop, the app on your computer. But if the data person keeps all that data on their computer, how do the other BI folks get access to it? This is where shared datasets are crucial. To share a dataset, the data person must first publish their report in the Power BI Service. Inside the Power BI Service, there are various ways to look at our published data, but for this you'll wanna select the Datasets item from the left menu. From here, we can share our datasets by selecting the ellipsis and choosing Share.

Once you've shared a dataset with a colleague, it will show up on their datasets view in this bottom section, and you can begin generating insights via Create Report. Another form of shared datasets, but on a much bigger scale, a public scale, are the apps. Apps are essentially datasets or templates that are shared with the public. These either have data themselves or are published for public use, such as Popular Stocks app or the NFL Analytics app, or they are template apps, which allow you to easily connect with your own data and then use some predesigned reports, or design some reports yourself, such as the Microsoft Project Web app and the GitHub Repository Usage. And these are just the beginning of the power available to you through Power BI apps.