Paginated Reports for Pro Users

There was some huge news out of the PASS Data Community Summit earlier this week as Microsoft announced that paginated reports are now supported with Power BI Pro licences.

It feels like this was one of the top requests on the Power BI ideas website for a very long time, and to be honest I always thought it was a bit of a pipedream – just an example for people asking for premium features, but at no extra cost. However, Microsoft have decided to offer this functionality to a wider audience.

I already blogged earlier this year about the fact that paginated reports was one of my favourite features of Premium per user licenses. (For what it’s worth, I still think the other additional features in PPU still make it a worthwhile option)

But with this new announcement now providing availability of paginated reports to a bigger user base, it feels like a subject revisiting in more detail.

Why use paginated reports?

What is the purpose of paginated reports?

The classic trope is that paginated reports are used for “pixel perfect” reporting. This is a fallacy – if you get stuck in to using paginated reports I guarantee that you will spend many a frustrated hour trying to figure out why report objects aren’t aligning properly, or why they render differently in the web view versus the print view, or even why they render differently in the Power BI service versus running the report locally using Power BI Report Builder.

Printing content

They do still have their place though. A common cited reason is that it’s for when people what to print out content. Again, that’s a bit of a tenuous reason – you can print content in regular Power BI reports too – I worked with a client relatively recently where we produced a weekly management pack that was printed out for their CEO each week – no sight of paginated reports being used there.

But that only works if you know exactly what the size and shape of the data is going to be. Imagine a situation where you are printing a picking list for a warehouse. You never know if the report might have 1,2 3 or more pages of data. In Power BI, long lists of data are truncated and the full data is only accessible with an interactive scroll bar – that experience doesn’t print well. A paginated report will print and display the data over as many pages as are needed.

They also have the ability to generate pages by group. Say you wanted to produce a one page summary per supplier. Again, in Power BI you could use slicers to vary the content on a page, but a paginated report will generate separate pages, which again works well for printing out, and that’s dynamic too, so if the number of suppliers varies over time, you don’t have to worry about setting up new pages.

Data exports

I think they also work well for data exports. Again, yes you can export to excel from Power BI, but the experience is a bit naff and the data exports without any formatting. Paginated reports will allow the export of nicely formatted and consequently much more readable data extracts. It’s worth also noting that in Power BI exports are limited to 30,000 rows for a CSV file and 150,000 rows for an Excel workbook. No such limit exists in paginated reports.

Using the paginated reports visual in Power BI even allows you to embed these exportable tables in Power BI reports, and I’d argue that even from a presentation perspective, the reports can do a much better job of representing table and matrices in a report with far more control over formatting options such as column widths.

Pseudo composite model

Using that paginated report visual as a drill down page in reports is a favourite use case of mine, and as mentioned in my previous blog, this also opens up the possibility of creating pseudo composite models, where you don’t even have to bring that granular, row level data in to your Power BI dataset, you can instead using common dimensions to drill in to data stored in a database, a pattern that works particularly well if you’re Power BI Dataset and underlying data source are both being refreshed on the same cadence.

Learning paginated reports

So with all these new possibilities open to you, where can you learn more about using paginated reports?

First step is realising that Paginated Reports is essentially a re-skinning of the old SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) tech. Therefore, when looking for resources about paginated reports, often searching for SSRS related content is a good place to look.

Beyond that, I must thank Laura Graham-Brown who has compiled this excellent list of resources on her website.

This includes not only her own content, but also call outs to official Microsoft resources, links to content from Paul Turley, one of the kings of SSRS (including his freely available e-book on SSRS recipes) and even links to my own YouTube series (which you can also find here).

So now you’re set – go forth and paginate! And let me know how you get on. Are there any novel uses you can come up with for using this feature?