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Power BI Dataset data source support for Paginated Reports is now available

Headshot of article author Christopher Finlan

As discussed in our blog post announcing support for Azure Analysis Services,  we promised to unlock the critical capability of allowing Paginated Reports to be built on the same enterprise semantic model as your interactive reports.  This week for “New Feature Friday”, we’re pleased to announce that Power BI Datasets in premium workspaces are now supported as data sources for your Paginated Reports.  While we announced the ability for authors to create reports using Power BI datasets (via the XMLA endpoint) in Power BI Report Builder three weeks ago, we’ve now unlocked the capability to publish these reports to the service and be shared widely across your organization either via apps or e-mail subscriptions.

Please note the XMLA endpoint will be enabled again in production by April 28th.


Create paginated reports with Power BI Datasets

To create a paginated report using Power BI datasets with Power BI Report Builder, you can select SQL Server Analysis Services as your source and connect to your Power BI Dataset using the instructions discussed in the announcement for XMLA support.  With paginated reports, you may choose one or more Power BI datasets to connect to in the same report, as there are no restrictions on the number of live data sources a report author may use.  Both Power BI datasets using imported data or Direct Query can be used with your paginated reports.  Be sure to read the documentation about creating reports with Report Builder to learn more about authoring paginated reports.


Upload to Power BI

After you have saved your paginated report file, you can then go to the Get Data screen within the service and upload your report to a Premium workspace.  You’re not limited to the same workspace as your Power BI datasets being used for your paginated reports, so you may choose any workspace in your Premium capacity to publish your reports to.  As always, when you consume the semantic model(s), 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.


Distribute your paginated reports across the organization

You can easily share your paginated reports you’ve created now against your Power BI datasets either via individual report sharing, apps, or e-mail subscriptions.  You may subscribe yourself or other users to these reports with a full PDF of the report attached.  Make sure you read the documentation to learn more about the specific paginated report capabilities around e-mail subscriptions.

This has been a top feature ask since we first launched paginated reports, and we’re excited to hear your feedback.  We’ll have another post next week announcing more new features for Paginated Reports, including additional data source support.  Have a wonderful weekend!