Power BI is the analytics powerhouse which contains a set of features and functionalities with regard to helping users visualize data and share insights. Some advanced features allow the users to create much more robust visualizations, much more insightful analyses, and thus, overall better data-driven decisions in Power BI. Here are some of the advanced features in Power BI:
Power BI Paginated Reports
Paginated reports are pretty highly formatted reports, pixel perfect, that are designed to print or share. They are called paginated because they print that well on a page. They are don’t work like a normal Power BI report. Rather, they can span across many pages. The standalone tool for authoring paginated reports for the Power BI service is Power BI Report Builder.
How to Create Paginated report visual
How to create a paginated report varies depending on the tools you’re using. You can open your Power BI report in Power BI Desktop or in the Power BI service to create a paginated report using quite a popular tool called Microsoft Power BI Paginated Reports. Paginated reports are perfect when building highly formatted, table-like reports that neatly fit on a printed page.
Here’s step-by-step instructions on how to create a paginated report:
Step 1 – Open your report – to create paginated report visual, open your report in Power BI Desktop or in the Power BI service. If you have it open in the Power BI service, select Edit.
Note – For power BI desktop first you should open your report on desktop
Source – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/paginated-report-visual
Step 2 – Open paginated visual Report – To open paginated visual report, select Paginated Report from the Visualizations pane.
Step 3 – Click on Connect to report.
Source – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/paginated-report-visual
Step 4 – Select the paginated report – Choose an existing paginated report that you have stored to the Power BI service. Look for the existing paginated report to select it.
Step 5 – Select Set Parameters – This is an optional step. if you want to Add or edit the parameters just follow these steps:
To Add the parameters – Right-click on Parameters in the ‘Report Data’ panel. Then, click ‘Add Parameter,’ select properties, including name, data type, and prompt text.
To Edit Query to Use Parameters: Edit your dataset query to filter based on these parameter values.
Source – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/paginated-report-visual
Step 6 – Mapping of report –First, identify which of your columns in your data model you would like to serve as a parameter for your paginated report.
Then, Drag this Power BI field into the Parameters field in the Visualizations panel. Once the field is added, select it in the dropdown menu to create the binding.
Now, click on ‘see report’ button to preview results in a paginated report.
Source – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/paginated-report-visual
Step 7 – Save the changes – Screenshot of paginated report rendering in a Power BI report. Now your paginated report will render within your Power BI report.
If you’re editing within the Power BI service, Click Save to save your changes.
Source – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/paginated-report-visual
Step 8 – Publish your report – If you’re editing in Power BI Desktop, Click Publish, then select a workspace in a Premium capacity to publish your Power BI report to the Power BI service.
Source – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/paginated-report-visual
Benefits of Paginated reports
You might be wondering why you need to make a paginated report visual if you could export the same functionality by exporting a data table. So, we have a few advantages; we will just tell you some of the benefits of the paginated reports within Power BI and how you might go about creating beautiful reports that meet your business needs.
Here are some advantages of paginated report visuals in Power BI:
- Detailed Reporting : Paginated reports allow one to present detailed tabular data in a structural manner and is thus suitable for financial reports, invoices, as well as other reports that require a line-by-line detail.
2. Cross-filtering : Cross-filtering in paginated reports allows users to interactively drill down into the data rendered in a report. It map your paginated report parameters to fields in the Power BI report. If you have other visuals that affect the Power BI field you’ve selected for the parameter values, the paginated report visual updates as you interact with those visuals.
For example, if you have a table of sales data and a chart showing sales trends, selecting a particular region on the table could filter the chart to show only the sales trends for that particular region. As this Power BI field for sales trends is mapped to the paginated report parameter for sales trends.
3. Export multiple format – Hence, we can observe that tables support export only in excel format (xlsx) whereas paginated reports support eight different formats.
- Excel
- Word
- CSV
- XML
- MHTML
- PPTX (PowerPoint)
- Image (PNG)
4. Use various Visualization Tools – Depending on the report building tool you’re using, look for Visual Analytics tools built into the platform. Be it Power BI Reporting Services, SSRS, or otherwise, many of these tools provide them natively; sometimes, features such as slicers, drill-throughs, or bookmarks can also be added to usability.
In your Power BI report you can add the Paginated report like you would any other visual.
source – https://databear.com/benefits-of-paginated-reports-in-power-bi/
5. Unlimited Rows – Although this will not be an issue for you, be aware that tables have an export limit of 150,000 rows. Paginated reports have no such limit.
With these many advantages, the only drawback here is the processing speed with paginated reports: as this report is supposed to sort through so much data and SQL queries, refreshing the visual may take a little longer than we would have liked.
Row-Level Security (RLS)
Row-Level Security or RLS, is a very important and unique feature of Power BI. This feature limits a user’s access to data. Users and groups will only view the data that suits their needs, but they are not permitted to look into data outside their permissions.
This feature play very important role for many organizations who wishing to share reports and dashboards securely instead of having all users read all the data and probably many that are irrelevant to them.
RLS in Power BI- Key Concepts- There are some key concepts which of followed by Power BI to boost up its security system:
Roles: In a Power BI dataset, you define roles. Each role includes DAX filters that outline what information a person in that role would be allowed to see.
Filters: The DAX expressions used to implement data filters for any role can filter tables based on user attributes or general conditions.
User Mapping: RLS requires a mapping between users and roles. You can set this up in Power BI Desktop for testing purposes and publish to the Power BI Service where you can assign users or groups to the roles.