Today at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, we are announcing the general availability of Paginated Reports in Power BI. Based on the technology used in SQL Server Reporting Services, Paginated Reports brings a new set of enterprise reporting capabilities to the Power BI service. It enables developers and BI professionals to create and distribute highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports right alongside their interactive Power BI content, becoming the first cloud BI solution that combines the power of self-service BI with the needs and capabilities of traditional Enterprise BI scenarios.
Why Paginated Reports?
The success of any modern data-driven organization requires that information is available at the fingertips of every business user to guide their day-to-day decisions. To date, Power BI has allowed self-service business users to create interactive report content that can be shared and consumed by others in the organization. However, enterprise customers across all industries continue to have on-going demands for document-style reports with visualizations that provide additional control, like which tables expand horizontally and vertically to display all their data and continue from page to page as needed. Paginated Reports in Power BI now allows these organizations to generate these fixed-layout documents optimized for printing and archiving, such as PDF and Word files. BI Professionals can create and distribute this content to their business users through Power BI Apps and E-Mail Subscriptions or embed them into applications they distribute both inside and outside their organization. Paginated Reports also allow the same level of customization they’ve offered for years, allowing authors to use familiar tooling and securely embed custom code, complex functions or custom assemblies in any of their reports.
First-class citizen of Power BI
Paginated Reports are more than another content type we’ve added to the Power BI platform. We’ve focused on integrating and enhancing many existing Power BI capabilities with those found in SSRS, enabling customers to leverage these features for all their assets in Power BI.
- Paginated Reports can consume data from Azure Analysis Services and Power BI datasets, allowing customers to build on the enterprise semantic models already used across Power BI. This helps reduce the complexity of reporting deployments that mix interactive and paginated reporting.
- In addition to the above, Paginated Reports can also consume data directly from several popular on-premises data stores such as SQL Server, Oracle, and Teradata, as well cloud data sources such as Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. These work for report authors as they do today with Reporting Services, giving paginated report authors an easy on-ramp to create new reports for Power BI or migrate their existing reports residing on-prem today.
- Power BI Report Builder is optimized for authoring content for the Power BI service. With today’s update, authors can securely connect to Power BI and browse workspaces, open paginated reports, edit them live, and save them back to the Power BI service without requiring them to download and re-publish their content.
- E-Mail Subscriptions are a key part of Reporting Services, and we’ve introduced several enhancements to those capabilities in Power BI since the preview launched to bring those same features to Power BI. An item many customers had been requesting for their consumers was to allow them to subscribe themselves and others to content stored in Premium workspaces and distributed as part of their Apps. We’re pleased to announce we’re rolling out that capability this week to our customers, and for all reports and dashboards in those apps and workspaces.
- Central administration capabilities are something our customers look for to provide proper security and access in any Enterprise BI solution they use. As part of that, we’re adding the ability to enable and disable e-mail subscriptions for the first time in the Power BI service. This capability will continue to be on by default, but organizations that need an additional level of control may now disable this at a tenant level.
How are customers using Paginated Reports?
Since we launched the public preview of Paginated Reports last November, thousands of customers have been using it to build new solutions. We want to thank all our preview customers for trying out the product and giving us valuable feedback. Based on this input, we have made several quality, reliability, and performance improvements. We’ve also prioritized several new features based on our conversations with customers and what they need to successfully deploy and use these capabilities at scale in the future.
Insight Enterprises, Inc. empowers organizations of all sizes with Insight Intelligent Technology Solutions™ and services to maximize the business value of IT. As a Fortune 500-ranked global provider of digital innovation, cloud and data center transformation, connected workforce, and supply chain optimization solutions and services, they help clients successfully manage their IT today while transforming for tomorrow.
“With Paginated Reports in Power BI, we finally have a one-stop shop for our users to consume different types of reports. This has truly been a game changer; users no longer must search multiple places for the desired report. This new implementation has improved the overall experience of consuming reports and has increased usage throughout the business to make critical decisions based off data.”
James Newsome, Senior Business Intelligence Manager
Johnson, Mirmiran & Thompson is an employee owned, multi-disciplined firm offering a full array of planning, design, and construction phase consulting services for infrastructure projects throughout the United States and its territories since 1971. Their client base consists of federal, state, and local government agencies as well as many private institutions, commercial, and industrial clients.
“With the addition of Paginated Reports in the Power BI Service, Power BI truly is our one stop shop for enterprise reporting within our company. One of the best feature additions is the ability to connect to Power BI Datasets as a data source – we can now leverage all of the certified datasets we have developed in Power BI over the past couple years.”
Tanner Spaulding, Data Analytics Manager
Paginated Reports are now generally available in Power BI Premium and can be deployed to any of our public cloud environments across the globe. Government and National cloud support are being rolled out to all regions in the coming months as well.
Please use the following resources to learn more about the product, get your questions answered, and give us feedback and suggestions.
If you’re attending the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, you’ll hear much more about Paginated Reports directly from several of our product engineers and program managers who are in attendance to answer your questions and get your feedback.