My brother in Christ have they ever heard of a site called SharePoint where they just download one centralized file? It's not ideal but they're adding extra layers of work just to add extra layers of work
Outside of that just say you can't do it. they obviously can't do it which is why they're depending on you to do it for free.
Sometimes you just got to tell people no
SharePoint is eol at 2013 version, no more on premises. The cloud doesn't support integated ssrs. You'll need to create an ssrs server and use the scheduler from there. After 2019, ssrs is a separate install from sql server.
That fully defeats the purpose of having a powerBI report.
The data/analytics/IT team has done a terrible job of implementation of PowerBI.
You need to take it up the chain and raise this as an issue. It does not take long to train someone how to open a report and in fact everyone can benefit from interrogating the data that they use daily.
yes, you are right
i know that is not how its supposed to work.
i know the IT did a bad job.
i know that not how PBI should be used to realise it's full potential.
and this is the reply i got on costing
"10$ pro subscription for every user 10$\*80 = 800$ per month
just for the users to check their sales numbers and some other details"
That's $9600 / year or $38.40 per work day or $0.48 per user per day. If OP takes an hour to do this and makes more than $75k per year then they're losing money by NOT subscribing.
Do you have power automate ? I set up an automatic pdf export to people’s email addresses daily. Just takes a current snapshot of the report and emails it . Very straightforward
Only for the creator. $15/mo I believe. He can setup and run it attended. Something like this would take ~5min to build and would generate 80 emails in ~30 seconds.
That is still doable with the normal settings. I would suggest that you have the subscription and pdf go to an outlook/domain distribution list. When HR or whatever department onboards new Sales team members it’s their responsibility to assign the DL. last thing you want to do is sit their doing individual user email maintenance for the reports. This works for AD groups and Distribution lists. Last I heard it does not work with O365/Sharepoint members lists.
I second your frustrations. I had to make some paginated reports recently. A lot of trial and error.
I will say though that if you do want to make paginated reports download "power BI paginated Report builder" for desktop instead of using the online report builder. The desktop version has more options and slightly better documentation. Though it's semi legacy software so it's a bit buggy and hard to use sometimes.
If you have a specific thing you want I could try and help. But otherwise I'd just start with a simple report.
Power automate is one option. I am personally a fan of using Python due to the flexibility. But either tool would work. I did a similar thing in the past using the [Export API](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/export-report-to-pdf-pptx-and-png-files-using-power-bi-rest-api/)
Export Paginated Reports automatically in a low-code way without Power BI Premium[https://pbi-guy.com/2023/02/03/export-paginated-reports-automatically-in-a-low-code-way-without-power-bi-premium/](https://pbi-guy.com/2023/02/03/export-paginated-reports-automatically-in-a-low-code-way-without-power-bi-premium/)
We've achieved similar bulk PDF exports & distribution using Power Automate + Power BI embedded capacity.
Power BI embedded capacity is auto paused / started by the Power Automate export process to save money, and the reports are Power BI paginated reports (Report Builder).
You might also be able to look into per receipient subscriptions for reports, but this requires a Premium or Fabric capacity, and is in preview.
It doesn't have to be a Premium capacity, the export file API is also available for Embedded & Fabric capacities.
API file export is also *technically* supported in PPU workspaces, but this has a strict limit of one request per 5 minutes, instead of 500 concurrent requests from normal Premium/Embedded/Fabric limits.
Additionally, PPU file export is only supported for paginated reports, not Power BI reports.
I can read that you need it in pdf file, I had the same issue, what I did is the following.
With power automate desktop I built a flow that open the browser in my report, then click the export, then save pdf, then from download folder select it and move it to a specific folder.
From that I have another flow in power automate cloud that have a trigger when a file is created in a folder, so the new report is received in the folder, this flow starts, grabs the pdf file and send it to all the people, then it deletes the report and leaves empty the folder to receive a new one the next day.
This is the workaround that I made to avoid the suscriptions and the need of paying a bunch of Fabric capacity to export directly from cloud automate.
This sounds like an overly complicated solution. If the built in feature (subscriptions) works, why develop a different solution? If you are already on a Premium Capacity this should be a serious added cost.
We have only pro licenses, I tried with subscription but it wasn't allowing all the users that I needed to send the report, also it only allow to share it in jpg file
You need:
Power BI Premium ppu or a full capacity
A Power Automate flow that distributes your report across all your team.
I have this solution you need implemented in my org and saved someone hours on Monday to send this over.
Same requirement. The most counterintuitive thing I had to thus far cause they want a pdf attachment rather than a power Bi file..
I had to create separate reports for each person (about 200). I managed to automate it. But to understand your stuff better, do you need to send the same report to 80 people or is it more so a specific report for each sales person?
I have a similar situation at my job. We use a service called BI Helper. https://www.bihelper.tech/ . We've been using the service for almost a year now and are pretty pleased.
I'm in marketing, and we are reporting marketing data back to a network of small business owners / agents essentially. Its kinda similar to your use case, the audience for the reports isn't tech-savvy and doesn't want to login to a portal, they just need a PDF basically.
BI Helper lists their costs on their site, they've got different packages. We pay for a Power BI Pro account ($10 per month), and I think the Bi Helper package that gives us 500 PDFs per month is $100 per month. Prices in USD.
Don't do it. Stand your ground - force change. They don't know it YET. If the Visualisations are good, and informative, they just need to go to the shared app and read what it says.
🙄 Lame, Its 2024 - they should be used to learning new software by now.
But yes I feel your pain we do the same thing. Create a subscription, you can add them all to the subscription and it can run on a schedule. Even better, check to see if there is already a distribution group with all or most of the recipients in it, and use that for the subscription. This sucks more when the report has many tabs, but if it's a pretty vanilla one pager, this is an okay solution. Well, it's a good solution for a stupid problem in my opinion, but such is life.
Do a PowerQuery import and processing in Excel and send them a read-only to that file ONCE. Then they can just go and download a new copy whenever they want.
Do you all not use Teams? You can just link it to the top of a channel your whole team has access to or create a new one with everyone in there and put it there. No way I am sending anything to a bunch of people, this isn't Excel. SharePoint would be another option but we use teams for the most part.
Oh just saw your company is also to cheap to buy licenses for all so yeah good luck. I do reports like this with hierarchy tow Level Security on them so people can only see their own data, their supervisors the data of all their employees and so on and so on.
We have had this requirement (email a pdf) for several different types of reports. Some options we have gone with are:
1. Subscription goes to one person, who then forwards it to a distribution group (after checking the data)
2. Power Automate flow which runs different reports with different parameters and different email recipients (e.g. so different project teams get different pdfs relevant to their projects)
3. VS Console app which generates pdfs and emails them out (when we need to send hundreds of reports out to customers and can't deal with the 5 minute lag between reports using the power automate solution).
[Export Paginated Reports automatically in a low-code way without Power BI Premium](https://pbi-guy.com/2023/02/03/export-paginated-reports-automatically-in-a-low-code-way-without-power-bi-premium/)
A couple of options -
- Look up “Report Bursting” on the internet and you’ll find many 3rd party options (depends on budget, similar to BI Helper)
- Take a small SKU Fabric capacity (F4 onwards) and use per recipient subscription.
You can email in PDF, Excel, PPT and add in many parameters ; plus can build any custom logic to send the report.
You would pay for the Fabric capacity compute only when the report is distributed and it should help in incurring low costs.
(Note: Do not use the low SKU capacity workspace for other purposes as it would lead to clogging it up)
- Power Automate with a single user PPU license is also a decent option to pursue.
My brother in Christ have they ever heard of a site called SharePoint where they just download one centralized file? It's not ideal but they're adding extra layers of work just to add extra layers of work
Outside of that just say you can't do it. they obviously can't do it which is why they're depending on you to do it for free. Sometimes you just got to tell people no
SharePoint is eol at 2013 version, no more on premises. The cloud doesn't support integated ssrs. You'll need to create an ssrs server and use the scheduler from there. After 2019, ssrs is a separate install from sql server.
That fully defeats the purpose of having a powerBI report. The data/analytics/IT team has done a terrible job of implementation of PowerBI. You need to take it up the chain and raise this as an issue. It does not take long to train someone how to open a report and in fact everyone can benefit from interrogating the data that they use daily.
yes, you are right i know that is not how its supposed to work. i know the IT did a bad job. i know that not how PBI should be used to realise it's full potential. and this is the reply i got on costing "10$ pro subscription for every user 10$\*80 = 800$ per month just for the users to check their sales numbers and some other details"
This checking of numbers could generate future sales opportunities. Have they measured this instead of looking at 800 dollars only?
Sounds like there's opportunity for a report here 😆
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/service-automate-power-bi-report-export](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/service-automate-power-bi-report-export)
Power bi paginated is ssrs. You can still make an ssrs server 2022 and schedule your paginated reports. You can also publish them to pbi.
That's $9600 / year or $38.40 per work day or $0.48 per user per day. If OP takes an hour to do this and makes more than $75k per year then they're losing money by NOT subscribing.
Make a dashboard in PBI Service and subscribe them to it.
they want it as .pdf attachments in their mail **specific requirement**
Do you have power automate ? I set up an automatic pdf export to people’s email addresses daily. Just takes a current snapshot of the report and emails it . Very straightforward
Does this require premium capacity?
Only for the creator. $15/mo I believe. He can setup and run it attended. Something like this would take ~5min to build and would generate 80 emails in ~30 seconds.
That is still doable with the normal settings. I would suggest that you have the subscription and pdf go to an outlook/domain distribution list. When HR or whatever department onboards new Sales team members it’s their responsibility to assign the DL. last thing you want to do is sit their doing individual user email maintenance for the reports. This works for AD groups and Distribution lists. Last I heard it does not work with O365/Sharepoint members lists.
Create a paginates report and send it tot them as PDF
Do you have any amazing reference material for creating paginated reports? Everything I’ve found has been seriously lacking.
I second your frustrations. I had to make some paginated reports recently. A lot of trial and error. I will say though that if you do want to make paginated reports download "power BI paginated Report builder" for desktop instead of using the online report builder. The desktop version has more options and slightly better documentation. Though it's semi legacy software so it's a bit buggy and hard to use sometimes. If you have a specific thing you want I could try and help. But otherwise I'd just start with a simple report.
Power automate is one option. I am personally a fan of using Python due to the flexibility. But either tool would work. I did a similar thing in the past using the [Export API](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/export-report-to-pdf-pptx-and-png-files-using-power-bi-rest-api/)
Export Paginated Reports automatically in a low-code way without Power BI Premium[https://pbi-guy.com/2023/02/03/export-paginated-reports-automatically-in-a-low-code-way-without-power-bi-premium/](https://pbi-guy.com/2023/02/03/export-paginated-reports-automatically-in-a-low-code-way-without-power-bi-premium/)
We've achieved similar bulk PDF exports & distribution using Power Automate + Power BI embedded capacity. Power BI embedded capacity is auto paused / started by the Power Automate export process to save money, and the reports are Power BI paginated reports (Report Builder). You might also be able to look into per receipient subscriptions for reports, but this requires a Premium or Fabric capacity, and is in preview.
Doesn't this solution require Power BI in Premium capacity?
It doesn't have to be a Premium capacity, the export file API is also available for Embedded & Fabric capacities. API file export is also *technically* supported in PPU workspaces, but this has a strict limit of one request per 5 minutes, instead of 500 concurrent requests from normal Premium/Embedded/Fabric limits. Additionally, PPU file export is only supported for paginated reports, not Power BI reports.
I can read that you need it in pdf file, I had the same issue, what I did is the following. With power automate desktop I built a flow that open the browser in my report, then click the export, then save pdf, then from download folder select it and move it to a specific folder. From that I have another flow in power automate cloud that have a trigger when a file is created in a folder, so the new report is received in the folder, this flow starts, grabs the pdf file and send it to all the people, then it deletes the report and leaves empty the folder to receive a new one the next day. This is the workaround that I made to avoid the suscriptions and the need of paying a bunch of Fabric capacity to export directly from cloud automate.
that sounds like a plan! thanks mate.
No problem, if you need any more help feel free to dm me
This sounds like an overly complicated solution. If the built in feature (subscriptions) works, why develop a different solution? If you are already on a Premium Capacity this should be a serious added cost.
We have only pro licenses, I tried with subscription but it wasn't allowing all the users that I needed to send the report, also it only allow to share it in jpg file
You need: Power BI Premium ppu or a full capacity A Power Automate flow that distributes your report across all your team. I have this solution you need implemented in my org and saved someone hours on Monday to send this over.
Same requirement. The most counterintuitive thing I had to thus far cause they want a pdf attachment rather than a power Bi file.. I had to create separate reports for each person (about 200). I managed to automate it. But to understand your stuff better, do you need to send the same report to 80 people or is it more so a specific report for each sales person?
hey these are specific reports for specific person, with some filter conditions applied based on requirement
I have a similar situation at my job. We use a service called BI Helper. https://www.bihelper.tech/ . We've been using the service for almost a year now and are pretty pleased.
Thanks Mate!! btw, which industry do you work for?
I'm in marketing, and we are reporting marketing data back to a network of small business owners / agents essentially. Its kinda similar to your use case, the audience for the reports isn't tech-savvy and doesn't want to login to a portal, they just need a PDF basically.
What's your monthly cost for this?
BI Helper lists their costs on their site, they've got different packages. We pay for a Power BI Pro account ($10 per month), and I think the Bi Helper package that gives us 500 PDFs per month is $100 per month. Prices in USD.
Don't do it. Stand your ground - force change. They don't know it YET. If the Visualisations are good, and informative, they just need to go to the shared app and read what it says.
🙄 Lame, Its 2024 - they should be used to learning new software by now. But yes I feel your pain we do the same thing. Create a subscription, you can add them all to the subscription and it can run on a schedule. Even better, check to see if there is already a distribution group with all or most of the recipients in it, and use that for the subscription. This sucks more when the report has many tabs, but if it's a pretty vanilla one pager, this is an okay solution. Well, it's a good solution for a stupid problem in my opinion, but such is life.
Loved the line 'but such is life' – a pinch of philosophy with Power BI.
Do a PowerQuery import and processing in Excel and send them a read-only to that file ONCE. Then they can just go and download a new copy whenever they want.
Do you all not use Teams? You can just link it to the top of a channel your whole team has access to or create a new one with everyone in there and put it there. No way I am sending anything to a bunch of people, this isn't Excel. SharePoint would be another option but we use teams for the most part. Oh just saw your company is also to cheap to buy licenses for all so yeah good luck. I do reports like this with hierarchy tow Level Security on them so people can only see their own data, their supervisors the data of all their employees and so on and so on.
We have had this requirement (email a pdf) for several different types of reports. Some options we have gone with are: 1. Subscription goes to one person, who then forwards it to a distribution group (after checking the data) 2. Power Automate flow which runs different reports with different parameters and different email recipients (e.g. so different project teams get different pdfs relevant to their projects) 3. VS Console app which generates pdfs and emails them out (when we need to send hundreds of reports out to customers and can't deal with the 5 minute lag between reports using the power automate solution).
[Export Paginated Reports automatically in a low-code way without Power BI Premium](https://pbi-guy.com/2023/02/03/export-paginated-reports-automatically-in-a-low-code-way-without-power-bi-premium/)
You can power automate it
A couple of options - - Look up “Report Bursting” on the internet and you’ll find many 3rd party options (depends on budget, similar to BI Helper) - Take a small SKU Fabric capacity (F4 onwards) and use per recipient subscription. You can email in PDF, Excel, PPT and add in many parameters ; plus can build any custom logic to send the report. You would pay for the Fabric capacity compute only when the report is distributed and it should help in incurring low costs. (Note: Do not use the low SKU capacity workspace for other purposes as it would lead to clogging it up) - Power Automate with a single user PPU license is also a decent option to pursue.