Power BI is Microsoft’s platform for data visualization and discovering business insights. Its flexibility allows you to visualize limitless iterations of your data and generate insightful reports, but what happens when that data needs to make its way out of the dashboard and onto your desktop?
What are Paginated Reports?
Paginated reports are highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports optimized for printing or PDF generation. They are ideal for generating fixed-layout documents such as invoices, receipts, or forms. Another advantage of paginated reports is the ability to print or export all the data in a table without limitation to PDF, Excel, CSV, Word, or PowerPoint. The Report Builder app, which leverages the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) environment, provides the most configuration options. This allows you to connect to a variety of data sources, including semantic models, CSV, Excel, SQL databases, ODBC connections, and Azure Synapse Analytics. Data Analysts can also create paginated reports via Power BI desktop or in the Power BI service via web authoring. However, the data source connection is limited to that semantic model.
In Power BI, you can integrate paginated reports through the native paginated report visual. This visual enables you to render paginated reports directly alongside other visualizations enhancing the data storytelling experience. This flexibility allows you to leverage the full capabilities of paginated reports within the Power BI ecosystem, providing a seamless experience for creating and sharing detailed, print-ready reporting.
Paginated reports allow for more creativity in the layout of your reports by using dynamic text fields, custom field calculations to specify calculations and formatting, and placing floating text boxes. Combining all these elements with thoughtful colors results in professional reports containing the data you need with the formatting you want.
Setting up your Report
The first step in setting up your Report Builder report is to connect to a data source. For this example, I am just going to connect to a CSV file.
Once the data source is set up, then we can add in a table to hold our data, and we can begin to format that table.
We create this table by inserting either a table, matrix, or list into the workspace. This will let us add our dataset fields which are indicated by brackets within the table.
Grouping is an important concept within Report Builder, which exists for Rows and Columns. These will help you organize your data within the table, but those groups will also control how your data is summarized and displayed within the table. To edit these, click into the group properties and edit how the data is being grouped. Another functionality, parameters, allow you to insert customized filters into your report which gives users the ability to quickly get to the data they need.
Finally, we can move to formatting our text and titles. Report Builder has customization options to edit the borders, font, text color, page color, font size, alignments, etc. to hone in your report to look like exactly what you envisioned.
Utilizing Paginated Reports, we can now easily export our data into the format that we need. We can take two clicks and get a PDF to send as a report. Two more clicks and we have a csv file to share with analysts to begin getting insights, or set email subscriptions in the Power BI service to further automate the process. With paginated reports, your data is always ready to go wherever you need it!
Power BI and Paginated Reports, Better Together
Power BI offers a wide range of visualization capabilities, but limits end users ability to readily export data in a desired format. Exporting data from visuals with the current layout has and many end users do not understand how to leverage a live semantic model connection in Excel. Paginated Reports are a powerful and flexible solution, but they have other limitations. Together, Power BI and paginated reports are the perfect pair offering complementary strengths.
Are you or your agency thinking of providing exceptional customer-facing reports, by using Power BI Paginated Reports? Avaap's highly skilled data and analytics professionals are experienced in partnering to deliver compelling data experiences for your end users. Contact our team to learn more!