Power BI is a platform that lets you meet the diverse needs of your enterprise user base, from self-service analytics to centralized report distribution. A critical part of this flexibility is the enterprise semantic model, which provides a secure, governed, and descriptive representation of your business metrics, available as a single source of truth across your enterprise. This semantic model can be reused in reports built by your IT team, in those created by business analysts, and even in external BI tools like Excel or even third-party tools as recently announced with support for the XMLA endpoint.
Paginated Reports using the enterprise semantic model
Over the next month, we will also allow Paginated reports to be built on this same enterprise semantic model, reducing the complexity of reporting deployments that mix interactive and paginated reporting. Starting this week, you can build Paginated reports on semantic models from Azure Analysis Services. Later in April, you will also be able to build Paginated reports for semantic models deployed as Power BI datasets. As always, when you consume the semantic model the role-based security (RLS) defined in the model is honored for each user regardless of tool, and this is the same for Paginated reports.
How to get started with Azure Analysis Services and Paginated Reports
To connect to an Azure Analysis Services data source, use the existing option to connect to SQL Server Analysis Services in Report Builder and build your connection string accordingly. From there, you can simply build out your report as you’d do with any of the supported data source and upload it through the Power BI portal.
“New Feature Friday” for Paginated Reports
Today’s announcement is the first of several you’ll see for new features in Power BI. In fact, we’ll be announcing one every Friday for the next several weeks in what we’re calling “New Feature Friday”. These will include several highly anticipated features, including support for Power BI datasets, Sharing via Apps and E-Mail Subscriptions.
FAQ:
When is General Availability for the feature planned?
General availability for Paginated Reports is coming in a few months time. We have been spending the last few months working hard to add features and make sure the capabilities are GA-ready, so you should feel comfortable moving to production at any time before that if you’d like.
Will the feature be coming to smaller SKU sizes of Premium?
Yes, we are planning to support A3 and EM3 SKU sizes around the GA timeframe for customers as well as the currently supported Premium SKU’s.
Will the feature be available for Pro users vs. being a Premium only feature?
We know this is a popular request among our customers and users and we are continuing to evaluate options. Please vote on this idea to get updates as we evaluate future capabilities — Paginated Reports in Pro and Premium