The unfashionable corner of Power BI

Nobody gets excited about Paginated Reports. They're the unglamorous corner of the Power BI ecosystem — the bit that's really just SQL Server Reporting Services wearing a new badge. While everyone else is chasing Copilot demos and Direct Lake benchmarks, Paginated Reports just sit there, quietly being the answer to problems your business has every single week.

Because here's the reality: at some point, someone senior is going to ask for a pixel-perfect PDF. Or a full data extract that blows straight past Power BI's 150,000 row export limit. Or an invoice, a statement, a printable pack for a meeting where the wifi is patchy. And when that happens, a beautifully interactive dashboard is precisely no use to you.

Paginated Reports solve these problems. The catch? Almost nobody on your team knows how to build them, and Report Builder isn't the kind of tool you can just bluff your way through. It's quirky, it's dated, and the good knowledge is buried in fifteen years of SSRS forum posts.

That's what this course fixes.

What it looks like when nobody can build them

When your team can't build Paginated Reports, you see the workarounds everywhere:

• Analysts manually exporting, cropping and stitching screenshots into PDFs every month-end
• Power BI reports contorted into "print-friendly" layouts they were never designed for
• Stakeholders copy-pasting visuals into PowerPoint because they can't get a decent printed output
• Data extracts hitting export limits, so someone ends up running the same report eight times with different filters
• Operational documents — invoices, statements, compliance packs — being built in tools that can't be automated or governed

None of this shows up on a roadmap. It just quietly eats hours, every week, forever.

A day in the labs

Learn to Love Paginated Reports is a hands-on, full-day course built around a single case study. Your team doesn't watch slides about Report Builder - they build three complete reports themselves, on top of a Power BI semantic model, hitting the real-world snags (and learning the workarounds) along the way.

By the end of the day they'll know:

• When to reach for a Paginated Report — and when a Power BI report is the better tool for the job
• How Datasources, Datasets and DAX queries fit together — including the Query Designer and how to bring your own DAX
• How to handle parameters properly — date pickers, defaults and the quirks that catch everyone out the first time
• How to make reports genuinely print-friendly — page sizing, margins, repeating headers and taming overspill
• How to get totals right — including the non-additive measures that will quietly give you wrong numbers if you let them
• How to brand and polish reports — conditional formatting, custom palettes, headers, footers and logos
• How to publish and share in the Power BI Service

What your team walks away with

Your team leaves able to build, format and publish production-quality Paginated Reports - the kind that survive contact with a printer, an export to Excel, and a demanding stakeholder. No more screenshot-and-stitch. No more export limit workarounds.

That's it. One day, one practical skill, immediately useful.

If that sounds like something your team needs, reach out here and we can discuss things further.

The full agenda

A full day of instruction, demos and hands-on labs:

• The WHAT and WHY of Paginated Reports
  • What Paginated Reports are (and their SSRS heritage)
  • When to choose Paginated over a standard Power BI report
  • Real-world use cases: invoices, financial statements, operational extracts, compliance reporting
• Three ways to build - the Power BI Service, Report Builder, and the hybrid approach (plus why the Service-only option falls short)
• Lab 1 - Building our first Paginated Report
  • Connecting to a Power BI semantic model
  • Datasources, Datasets and the Query Designer
  • Parameters: dropdowns, date pickers, defaults and the gotchas
  • Print-friendly layouts, totals (including non-additive measures), styling, headers and footers
  • Publishing to the Power BI Service
• Lab 2 - Working with Matrices
  • Cross-tab layouts with row and column groups
  • Hierarchies, sub-totals and grand totals
  • Custom code functions for alternating row formatting
  • Taming whitespace and phantom pages
  • Adding interactive expand/collapse
• Lab 3 - Working with Charts
  • Donut and bar charts with branded custom palettes
  • Titles, subtitles, data labels and sorting
  • Layout tricks for multi-visual pages
• Honourable Mentions - sorting, grouping and page breaks, subreports, and embedding Paginated Reports in Power BI
• Further resources and Q&A

What it costs

No mystery pricing, no "book a call to find out". Here are the numbers:

• £449 per person per day (excluding VAT)
• 5 person minimum (or a minimum fee of £2,245 if your group is smaller)
• 10 person maximum - labs work best when I can actually get round everyone who's stuck, not lecture at a packed room

In-person delivery gets the best results - people stay engaged, ask more questions, and help each other through the labs. Bear in mind the prices above don't cover travel, venue hire or catering, which we'd sort separately.

Prefer remote? Online delivery is available on request.

Ready to book your team in? Get in touch here.