If you long for the days for pixel perfect reports of SSRS or Cognos but find yourself lost in the world of Power BI’s and Tableaus, this post is for you. Some times these new tools just cannot do the job of exactly formatted canned report runtime queries that the older tools used to be able to do for recipients of business intelligence users. Paginated Reports is SQL Server Reporting services surfaced through Power BI giving you the best of both worlds so here are Power BI Paginated Reports vs SSRS and Tutorial.
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Now back to the article…
1. What Are Paginated Reports
Paginated reports are essentially SSRS reports that can be designed and deployed through Power BI. You have the ability to add custom logic to nearly every element and line your reports up to the exact pixels of the screen giving you total command of the look and feel which allow for quality looking reports in printing and exporting
2. How to create Paginated Reports?
You can create reports by downloading the free tool for Power BI Report Builder right to your desktop. This is a standalone tool from Power BI. These reports are compatible with the Power BI Service.
3. What Data Sources Work with Paginated Reports
There is some limited data source capabililities for Paginated Reports when comparing to the vast library of Power BI. Report data is pulled at run time and not stored in an underlying model like Power BI.
Current sources include the following
- Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse
- Azure Analysis Services (via SSO)
- SQL Server via a gateway
- SQL Server Analysis Services via a gateway
- Power BI Premium Datasets
- Oracle
- Teradata
4. Deploying and Sharing Reports to Users
Paginated Reports can be deployed to the Power BI Service. From here you can leverage the ability to put a report in a workspace and let users subscribe to the report. Reports will be automatically emailed to users based on the subscription sending a PDF directly to the consumer.
5. Exporting Power BI Service
Paginated Reports can be exported in the following formats
- Excel
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft
- PowerPoint
- CSV
- XML
- MHTML
6. Licensing for Paginated Reports in Power BI
Unfortunately Paginated Reports in Power BI is not free the same way you need a SQL Server licence for SSRS reports. You will will need either a License for Power BI Embedded or have a Power BI Premium Capacity P1, P2 or P3.
7. Limitations on Paginated Reports
- Reports are not interactive. Similar to SSRS, all reports are essentially static one rendered with the exception of tables that can expand and collapse
- You must pay the licence to use these in production
- No access to Custom Fonts
- No sharing data sets across reports
If you enjoyed this post on Power BI Paginated Reports vs SSRS and Tutorial and want to learn more, check out my Udemy class on getting started learning about the tool!