As Nikhil mentioned in his blog post last week, it hasn’t been business as usual these last several weeks. But we’ve been continuing to make progress in several areas, and we’re excited to announce four new features and one training update coming to Power BI this month related to Paginated Reports.
- General Availability of external e-mail address support for subscriptions for both Power BI reports/dashboards and Paginated Reports (Premium only)
- Paginated Report support is now available in the Export API (currently in preview)
- Subreports feature (coming soon)
- Paginated View feature (coming soon)
- Self-study kit for Paginated Reports (now available)
General Availability of external e-mail address support
As we announced in February, customers with workspaces or apps backed by premium or dedicated capacity can now add users outside of the organization to e-mail subscriptions. This new functionality can be used whether or not you wish to add the user formally to your tenant as a B2B user, giving you the ultimate control around how you wish to share and distribute content externally. This functionality is finishing it’s rollout to all Premium customers by EOD on 4/14.
To learn more about these capabilities, please read through the updated documentation – Documentation Link
Paginated Report support is now available in the Export API
In early March, my colleague Alon Baram announced the availability of the new export API for Power BI reports. This allowed developers to make a REST call to generate a PDF, PPTX or PNG file of the report content programmatically.
We are pleased to announce we have expanded support of the API to include paginated reports as well. Additional enhancements to call out about the paginated report support include:
- Support for the following file formats – CSV, DOCX, IMAGE, MHTML, PDF, PPTX, XLSX, XML
- Ability to send parameter values
- Row-level security support for Power BI datasets
- No throttle on the number of API calls you can make per hour/capacity. Instead, a customers’s capacity size and allotted memory for paginated reports will determine the throughput that can be handled via API.
Be sure to grab the latest Power BI SDK from nuget. The documentation is updated and available here – Documentation Link
Subreport support (coming soon)
One of the most requested features has been support for subreports like we have today in SQL Server Reporting Services. For those of you who aren’t familiar with subreports, a subreport is a report item that displays another report inside the body of a main report. Conceptually, a subreport in a report is similar to a frame in a Web page. It is used to embed a report within a report.
We are putting the final touches on this feature and plan to release support publicly for this in the service and in Power BI Report Builder before the end of the month. We’ve also updated the migration tool on github to allow migration of SSRS content that contains subreports and the subreports themselves to the Power BI service, and then wire these items back up automatically as they get imported to a workspace. Look for a separate blog post on this highly anticipated feature when it’s publicly available.
Paginated View support (coming soon)
One of the enhancements to paginated reports we’re making available only in the Power BI service is to view and interact with your content in a similar fashion to when you’re using the “Print Layout” in Microsoft Word. When launched, a new View menu will appear in your toolbar.
You’ll see a new “Page View” option you can select to view the report in.
Once selected, you’ll see your report now just as you would when it is printed or exported, and still be fully interactive so you can change parameter values, etc. You’ll also have additional capabilities like the ability to zoom when viewing the report.
We’re planning to release this new feature in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for the official announcement!
Self-Study kit for Paginated Reports in a Day
Last but certainly not least, we’ve published an update to the very popular online course series, Paginated Reports in a Day. Now, you’ll be able to work through the labs on your own with Power BI Report Builder. The list of labs we’ve made available are:
• Lab 01A: Getting started
• Lab 01B: Creating your first report
• Lab 02A: Developing a report template
• Lab 03A: Developing a list report
• Lab 04A: Working with parameters
• Lab 05A: Developing a table report – Part 1
• Lab 05B: Developing a table report – Part 2
• Lab 06A: Adding interactivity features
To download the materials, head over to the online documentation for the course – Documentation Link
Whew! Lots to announce, but we’re excited to bring all of these items to you here over the next few weeks. Thanks for reading!